A short story about trusting yourself
Until 2020 I had a very simple, and very effective website. A homepage, a sparse amount of menu, a video on the homepage and a "let's go" button if people wanted to take the conversation further.
The simple, clear, direct message and path typically led to one new coaching client per quarter who found me on the website.
Then I met a marketing expert.
He told me I was doing it all wrong. "People need to get to know you before they'll connect with you", "There's not enough context, or story about who you are", "And the design is sparse and not warm".
I trusted his viewpoint. After all he was a marketing expert. What would I know?
We rebuilt the website in what was a long, involved process. The result looked visually appealing and told a far more complete story about who I was.
But ...
after a year, there had been no new enquiries.
after three years, still no new enquiries, let alone clients
Six years later, one enquiry off the website and still zero new clients.
Here's what he realized:
Yes, there are some people who need to "get to know you" before they contact you. But people who take a long time to make decisions have never been my clients. My best clients by results have always been those who have the capacity to implement a new idea fast.
I'd just invested money in creating a website that matched my marketing expert's belief about how people buy, not how I already knew my best clients engaged with me.
But the mistake was on me. I didn't trust my gut, my own process, and allowed the words of an "expert" to override not just my intuition but my own direct experience.
Worse, because I'd "invested so much in building it" I was reluctant to go back and fix it, because that would amount to admitting to an expensive mistake, the real expense being not the initial cost, but the compounding loss of business over a growing period of time as I continued to procrastinate.
This year I got real with myself and admitted the mistake, and within a month built a new website.
The site follows all the exact same principles that I used until 2020. But it's better because, well, I have done some extra cool things and become a better coach too since then.
Here's the finished result if you're curious
Daniel Batten
HOME - DanielBatten.co
Coaching for founders, leaders and Bitcoiners who are hitting the ceiling that ability alone cannot break. The work is subtractive: remove internal...
But the point of the story is this:
No matter how much expertise someone has, you are the expert on you. Don't trade that inner knowing for someone else's domain knowledge lightly. You know context they don't, and ignoring that can be expensive.
