Escaping live launch burnout. My shift to evergreen sales systems

Are you either preparing for a launch, in one, or recovering from one and its wrecking your nervous system? 

Yeah… I’ve been there.

In this episode, I’m spilling the behind-the-scenes of how I went from full blown live launch burnout to building evergreen systems that sell for me on autopilot.

You’ll hear:

• The one decision that changed everything for my business and my sanity.
• Why I ditched big bootcamps and shifted to simpler, cleaner webinar launches.
• How I turned that webinar into a 24.7 sales machine that honours my energy.
• And the sneaky signs your launch strategy might be secretly burning you out.

This one’s real, honest, and might be the permission slip your nervous system has been begging for.

If you'd like to dive deeper into evergreen sales systems to sell your courses on autopilot then grab my FREE Daily Sales Guide HERE.

Transcript

0:05

Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I'm an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love. If you are looking to uplevel your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator and business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in. Hello, my friend. Welcome back. Today's episode is a juicy one, and it's especially for those of you who find themselves in the launch burnout cycle. And if you have sold courses before, you will know what I'm talking about. You've done the challenges, you've done the boot camps, you've done the paid boot camps. You've done the multi-day events. The three month runway, you're either preparing and working on your launch. Or you're in a launch or you're recovering from a launch. And yes, they bring in sales because the launches, as we know, are powerful revenue injections into a business. It is the best skill to learn in the early days of business for sure. It's why I teach it inside of DBA, it's why I preach, learn the skill of launching. Because I do believe the first. Thing you should be learning is how to sell and launch something online that's scalable. That's at least the thing that helped me create so much freedom and income and impact. But as you become an advanced business owner, meaning you've been in the game for a while, a couple of years, you've sold some courses through launching, you've got a system, it's working. Eventually something happens, and I don't know if this happens to everyone, but I know it happens to a lot of us business owners, and I know it happens to me. It's that you experience launch burnout, and this is not just like, oh, I need a nap, kind of tired. This is literally like, why am I crying into my tea at 10:00 AM and fantasizing about quitting my business, kind of tired. So if you can relate to this and you might be thinking it's some other thing, but actually you're just feeling like resentment and stuff. If you can relate to this, then just know that I see you and I have been you. I have been there, and today I want to walk you through the fundamental shifts I had to make to break out of this live launch burnout cycle. And build evergreen systems that sell for me. So I could stop operating like a high performing hamster on a wheel and actually start living the freedom that I set out to create. And obviously making a lot of money gives you a lot of freedom, but if that is costing you your mental sanity, your mental wellbeing. And if that's costing you, your wrecking, your nervous system for that money, then it's a hard no. You know what I'm saying? We did not start businesses as women to wreck ourselves. We started businesses for freedom. And of course, making money is part of their freedom. But it's also freedom to live a happy life, to feel healthy and good in your body. In your mind. That is richness of life. And the way you sell, the way you generate income is very, very taxing on your body, your soul, and it wrecks you. Then it's not worth it, in my opinion. No amount of money is worth that to me because this is our life. We need to love what we're doing. We need to feel good in ourselves. We need to build sustainable practices that we can sustain. And there's nothing sustainable about these extremely intense, stressful launches and doing them so many times a year. It's just not sustainable. And yes, you'll see business owners doing it and they're making a shit load of money. But I'm telling you, so many of them behind the scenes are wrecked. And that's why you often see big business owners closing down their businesses. They just completely close it down because they've wrecked themselves. So that's what we're not here for. I'm all about sustainable business, like we are building this thing to nurture us and look after us for years and years and years. So how we choose to sell is a very important part of that. So I'm going to share with you three things that I've done that have made a big difference in my journey because I was there. I had been launching since 2018 and I'd done every launch under the sun and I had done paid free all the types of strategies and between, I think it was 2019 and 2022, somewhere in that period I was doing these paid bootcamps. And I made so much money off them. They did so well, but they took everything from me. And I'm telling you, I was wrecked after these things. I would like not be able to function for a month and just watch Love Island. And then I started really getting anxious and resenting the next one, coming and feeling this contraction feeling in my body. Like, Ooh, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. But I knew, okay, it's going to make money. It's going to be the easy choice. It's just rinse and repeat. It's what I know. It's what I'm comfortable with. So I would keep doing it. I think I did six of them. Until I realized, I absolutely cannot continue. And then this brings me to step one of the most fundamental things that I did to change this. The first thing was the decision to stop the pattern where it needs to stop. So let's just start here because this is the hardest part, but it is so important. Because there came a point in my business where I was just rinsing and repeating that paid bootcamp over and over, and it worked. It was making in money. It brought in like $67,000 in just one launch. People were enrolling. The dopamine hits were there. It was really amazing. The first couple of times I did it absolutely in alignment. I felt so good about it. But after about three of them, I started to feel wrecked. The last three, my nervous system was on edge. I would be in a bootcamp or recovering from it. And I'd spend weeks afterwards just shut down and just very burnt out. It was like a feeling of burnout. And this is the thing that no one tells you. Just because something works in your business for now doesn't mean it's going to be aligned for long term. Now you need to start noticing the signs as a business owner in your own body of what feels good to you. After about that third bootcamp from the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth one. There was resistance there. There was resentment resistance. It was a heavy energy. But I just kept ignoring it and just doing the thing. And then, eventually it had to get so bad that I actually had a very bad result in my last one. It was not worth the time at all. Yes, it made profit, but not nearly the amount of profit that it normally does. And so that was the confirmation that I obviously needed. I'm not responding to this. My energy is off. I'm resentful, and if you've got that energy, it's going to impact your sales. And so I had to then make that decision to stop. To stop repeating a strategy that drained me to stop ignoring the signals from my body and to stop thinking that this was just how it had to be. This is just how I have to make sales. Because of course, rinsing and repeating a launch strategy is the gold in business. And I often talk about the compound effect that happens when you rinse and repeat something that's working because that is what happens. You dial in a sales system. You bring more people into that sales system. Every launch and you get bigger results, you start making a lot of money. But if you are feeling like a train wreck at the end of it and you're starting to fantasize, deleting your course and like literally running away to Bali and never working on your business again. Then that is a big sign that something is not right and has to change. And there's a belief system here of I need to sacrifice myself to make money. I need to give myself and sell my soul to make this kind of money. It has to be hard. It has to be difficult. But that's not true. So you have to make a decision. That firstly, you're going to stop repeating the same thing over and over, and you're going to choose a new strategy that is going to honour your system, honour your body, that feels more in alignment to where you're are now. Step number one is choosing that new strategy and then it's also releasing that belief, or at least really paying attention to that belief of I have to sacrifice for myself to make sales and start finding evidence for the opposite to be true. Where you can make sales in such a good way, in such a nurturing way, in such a caring, loving, gentle, whatever it is. You can make sales in such a way that's so aligned that does not sacrifice you and your values or your energy levels. So it's the decision. It's the decision to change and to rewrite and to really audit yourself on that belief, because that belief is what's driving the action as well. If you believe that it's going to take you a lot. Like you have to sacrifice to make a lot of money and to make sales, you will keep falling into that same cycle of hard work, burnout, overworking, and doing things that are just not good for you. Not you can feel in your body. It's just not good for you anymore. So that's number one. Then number two is once making that decision and really trying to find evidence for that making sales can be good, can be easy, can feel good to your system. Then number two is deciding a different strategy. For me it was webinar launches. Of all the types of launches I've done. Webinar launches are my favourite ones for various reasons. But for me, what I had to ask when I was really burnt out in my paid bootcamp cycle of launches that I was just rinsing and repeating. I had to ask myself, okay, what would feel easier? What would feel lighter? And for me at that point, I needed to stop creating these very big multi-day live events. It was a 10 day event. I had to be on four hours day after day for 10 days. And it was just wild. And I just realized I couldn't even handle that. The whole launch thing. The whole bootcamp, it felt like two months of hardcore stress. And so I decided what's going to feel lighter to me? And that was the webinar launch. A simple webinar. So one powerful focused session with a group of people. Not like a five day bootcamp and all the bells and whistles. Just a well-crafted webinar that shared my story, connected deeply with my audience. I gave value and then invited them to continue working with me. For me, that just felt like the path of least resistance. I used to do webinars before the paid bootcamps. And I just went back to that. Even though a lot of marketers, they all say webinars don't work. But honestly, my first webinar that I did after my paid bootcamp was so easy. And it made more profit than my last bootcamp. Can you believe it? So it was an absolute game changer, and I was able to just show up so much more grounded. I didn't have that resentment. I wasn't wrecked. My energy was there. I could really bring it for 60 minutes or 90 minutes, however long it was. And it felt good. It felt good to me. I really enjoyed delivering it. And it was repeatable as well. So it wasn't just good for my nervous system and my energy, but it was also good for my sales. Because I sold enough and it was good, and I was happy. And I was like, oh my gosh there's the evidence. You don't have to sell your soul to make sales. And so one of the things that coach had once told me is that for a 1997 offer, it's better to do a paid bootcamp because it's a bigger offer and you must sell something low ticket in the front, and this this this. And so when you present the bigger offer, like you'll get more sales. But there was so much stuff that didn't go right with that strategy. And there's so many pieces of that puzzle that if there doesn't go right, you're not going to hit those numbers and you're going to sink a lot of money into ad spend. And I spent so much money on advertising just in that strategy. And it was a 1997 offer. And then I sold on a webinar 1997 offer, and then it sold perfectly fine. After 60 to 90 minutes. It sold. The conversion was there. The profit was there. The ROI was there. So this is just evidence for you that you don't have to do these crazy, very long, intense launches. Yes, you have to have a warm audience. You have to be nurturing and doing a bunch of things, but you can sell something on a webinar and make a sale directly and have a return on investment on it, and it doesn't have to wreck you. So if you've been feeling exhausted by the types of launches you're doing. Then maybe you're doing the wrong type of strategy for you, and now it's your time to shift. And my recommendation would be a webinar. Because I think it's the lightest on our energy and quickest you can do. And then it brings me to my next point, which is why I also love webinars, is that turning that webinar into an evergreen sales system is the next step. So that's the really awesome thing about running live webinar launches is that if it converts well live and you hit certain numbers, you can then turn it evergreen. And that means you build out an automated sales funnel with your webinar and all the sales emails and everything in one. It's not about just running a live webinar making sales. You turn that thing evergreen and you just have that thing ticking for you in the background and selling for you in the background. And if you do this strategically, there's obviously quite a bit of strategy to it, getting it right, because obviously sales conversions will go down for an Evergreen webinar versus a live one. But if you can do this strategically, what you can build is that you have a sales system that is selling your program 24/7 without you having to show up every day and do this whole big live launch rollercoaster all the time. So if you're doing a live launch every quarter, you can maybe do it twice a year and just let your Evergreen tick over and you just twice a year or whatever. And you make sales in other ways. You don't rely on just live launches to make sales. And of course there's a lot of strategy to it. I'm not saying it's necessarily the easiest thing. It's not something I would let a beginner do. I believe you need to do all of the live launching and go through that experience to get to the Evergreen, but it is the most worthwhile thing you can focus on in an online business is building evergreen sales system skills that are these machines that work for you because. It's going to give you your time, your energy, and your capacity back, and it's also going to give your audience access to offers whenever they need it. Because if you're going to tell someone something's coming and they can't buy from you for a long time, they're going to buy it from a competitor. Because that's what happens. As soon as they click your content, they'll then be shown content from your competitors. And if your competitors are faster at selling something, they're going to buy from the competitor. So it's this opportunity to give your people faster invite into your course. At a special price and it's going to bring in sales for you. It's going to give people a fast opportunity to work with you, and it's going to stop you having to rely on these big stressful launches that are great once, twice a year. But every three months it's not sustainable. And so for me, this is just such a shift in mindset in a way of running the business, in deciding differently. If this is how it's going to be, I will find another way. And I'll do what I can to find another way. And so for me, webinars were that way and turning them Evergreen. Of course, it's a piece of the evergreen funnel. You have to keep tweaking testing, running traffic, tweaking testing, but you're constantly working at it, and it's much lower stress than having one live launch where you have to get everything right and then the launch is over. With the Evergreen webinar, you're constantly running traffic to it, constantly tweaking. It's much better on your nervous system in terms of a strategy. You just cannot wing it. That's one thing I'll say. You cannot wing this. There's so many things that are important to getting this right. It's like baking a very extravagant cake. If you just wing it, you're going to mess it up. So you need to be mentored, you need to have a coach to show you how to do this, for sure. And that's what I did. I invested in mentorship to help me to do it. That's the magic. So my final thoughts for you, if you're thick in the live launch burnout cycle right now and you're feeling resentment around your business, you want to burn it down? Firstly, don't burn it down. Just know that there's something misaligned right now. You have to choose differently. You are evolving as a human. Your business needs to evolve with you, and you might be in a different season of life where you need more time, more energy, more capacity. Maybe you're grieving, maybe something's happened. Maybe you've had kids. Maybe you're trying to have kids, like your life is maybe changing and the way that you make sales needs to change as well. And you owe it to yourself to experiment with something else. So just because one strategy works for a while, it's not going to be your forever strategy. We constantly need to evolve. So this is the path that I walked. Number one, firstly decide to stop the cycle of rinsing and repeating and pay attention to how you feel, and then choose to experiment with something new whilst building a new belief system that you can make sales with ease. Literally write that mantra down. I make sales with ease. I make sales in a way that feels good to me. Sales come to me, with ease. I don't have to sacrifice myself for sales. That's the belief system you need to be installing. That's the core of that. Then the next step is to choose a more sustainable sales system. My recommendation is webinars, and the third step is to turn that webinar evergreen so it sells for you, so you're not always in hassle mode. It's so important. You get to honour your energy, you get to build a business that feels good, and you absolutely get to make sales without sacrificing your soul. So if today's episode landed, then I've got something for you. I have created a free guide called The Daily Sales Method. And it's for female course creators who are done with the extreme launch cycle that wrecks their nervous system. And inside, I'm sharing how six to seven figure business owners are building Evergreen sales machines behind the scenes in their business. And how you can start doing the same. So it's very practical. It's going to give you a bit of a behind the scenes snapshot into these key machines that I would call them. That you can start playing with the idea of, okay, where can I build this in my business? So I can move away from this unsustainable sales system into building a sustainable sales system in my business that supports me. You can click it in the show notes or message me daily sales, and I'll get it to you. Go grab that. It's free. And let's start taking one intentional step into making sales in a way that is more reliable, more consistent, and more nurturing to your energy. First and foremost. And yeah, just trust your energy and pay attention to it. because that's everything, right? We're not here to build misaligned businesses. We're here to build businesses that feed our soul. Make us feel good and support the lives we want to live. Thank you so much for being with me today. Have a beautiful rest of your day, and I'll chat to you soon. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you had some big aha moments from this episode or anything that really, really spoke to you, then please share it with me via email at michelle@digiteach.biz. Or on Instagram @_digity each_. It makes my day when I hear back from you regarding these podcast episodes. I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.