302: Don't Get Scammed By Quick Fixes

Steve Haase  0:01  
Welcome to a Superabound Podcast with master coaches, Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where entrepreneurs and leaders learn coaching tools to help you build a business you love. You're listening to Episode 302: Don't get scammed by quick fixes. It might sound a little preachy, but here's the thing. We all are drawn in, if there's someone who's offering exactly the thing that you want, I do it myself. I'm like, Oh, God, I want that to be true. I want that to just work work the way that they say it's going to work, whether it's building muscle generating leads, you know, anything out there that people want, someone is selling, with a shortcut with a weird trick with a little known secret. And spoiler alert, it doesn't work. So we're going to talk about what it is that draws us to those things, why they sound so compelling, what are some common ones that are out there and how to kind of reposition yourself for real success, rather than kind of getting getting hoodwinked by the scam artists that are out there all over the place? Yeah,

Erin Aquin  1:12  
we don't want you to get fooled. We don't want you to experience some of the things that we have experienced that our clients have experience. And I think maybe maybe it'd be interesting, Steve, to hear like, you've been in this, but let's talk about our business. You've been in this business for a couple of years. What's different about your understanding of being a full time entrepreneur, business owner, coach, that would have you not get scammed? Maybe the way that like your first few months of being brand new coach with with a stepping into a business, you could get scammed? Yeah,

Steve Haase  1:55  
I think it's realizing that a good business requires trust, it requires relationships. And when someone comes in and says, I will get you 30 qualified meetings this month, and every month until the end of time. I'm like, I want 30 qualified meetings every month and every month until the end of time. And then I pause for a moment and realize they don't have the keys to trust, all they're going to do is prey on other people's weaknesses the way they're trying to prey on mine. And that has me pause.

Erin Aquin  2:32  
Yeah, I think for me, the difference, as I've sort of matured as a business owner, is I know that there's like the marketing scheme out there. That's like positioning yourself as an expert. Even if it's your first month doing the thing you're doing, you're the expert, you know more than the customer. And I actually think as entrepreneurs, that is one of the most unhelpful beliefs we can have. The fact that someone who doesn't know anything about me, my business, my vision, my clients slides on into my DMs to promising me like 100k in 30 days or like whatever the scam is. I just know that that's not true. And I think having a number of years under my belt, I'm sure there's maybe someone out there that can deliver those results, but chances are I'm not going to agree with their method of doing so.

Steve Haase  3:39  
So what does somebody do when the chips are down? Maybe you've had a couple bad months maybe a client backed out things are heading in the wrong direction and you're tempted to throw that Hail Mary and say whatever I'm just gonna throw a couple grand at this person who pinged me and said I'll be able to make all your dreams come true

Erin Aquin  4:01  
so we've I think we've all been there and and whether it's like let's focus on the sales and marketing piece you said like the people who promise qualified meetings with like your dream clients every day for 30 days till the end of time. They promise you they know this weird trick. They can promise you they have this amazing track record. Maybe they rhyme off some names usually people you've probably never heard of. I think the the times that I have gone wrong. I haven't done this, like this specific thing, but like the times where I have buyer's remorse over something. What I didn't do in that moment was listen to my gut was listen to my own intuition, and the red flags. So when I've had made investments with people that turned out to be total bullshit or went really bad really fast. There were always signs. There were always red flags. There was always questions I didn't ask because I was so excited about the possibility was out there with my future self, living my dreams. And I think what I've what I've come to personally is like adding a healthy dose of skepticism. If someone's pressuring me to make an investment, to start a project, in certain timeframe, I want to know the reason for that. Why does it have to be by Friday? I want to know who's worked with them, I want to see their numbers I want to see, you know, I we don't share, you know, we don't let people call our clients up and like, ask them about their experiences. But we do have clients who we've worked with who've, very kindly without prompting, offered us testimonials, you can scroll through our Instagram and see clients saying things about their experience working with us, we have that on our website. But if I've never heard of anyone that this person has worked with, if they reached out to me, and now they're trying to pressure me for time on the phone, or to make my deposit now, if they're trying to be really careful about this one, this is we've been talking about this a lot in one of my coaching communities. If people are saying, Oh, do you have issues with like your credit, would you like us to set you up with a bank, we'll give you a loan, if they're trying to like hook you up with a third party to get a loan to pay for whatever service that they're providing immediate red flag run, like, run. So those types of things would be like for someone I'm going to hire for a particular service. Basically, if I haven't asked, and they are poking and prodding and rushing me and it feels pressure fueled, I am out. Totally out. If someone's supposed to be working for me, they need to work with my time. Not I'm not fitting into their timeline, so they can meet their quarterly

Steve Haase  7:26  
target. Yeah, well, and I think, for me, the red flag is actually it's an internal wish to bypass the hard work. And it's the ultimate promise of a product, get all the benefits you want, or none of the work that you don't want to do. Ideally, at a low low price. Like, that's gonna sell the best there could be. But but that desire to get something for nothing that we all kind of have in there is what what tipped me off to something's off here I'm in, I'm in a something for nothing. Mindset, that is only going to end up in bad places. Because the people who are offering that kind of too good to be true offer are there, they're there to pray, or they're to pray on me and my whatever desperation, I might be feeling in that moment, whether it's about my health and wellness, you know, not being strong enough, fast enough, young enough, any of those things about our relationship, you know, whether it's, you know, having the right communication or connection or whatever, or whether it's about the business, having enough leads, or sales. All of those things are something that we wish we could snap our fingers for. But when you pause and think about it, there is change required. If you think about any time you've gone on a health journey, or a business building journey, it has been a journey you've gone from not having it to having it from being in a place of, you know, starting to knowledge and mastery. And that is never a quick path. You can have a guide, you can have someone who, you know, offers you support along the way. But that person who says hey, here's a teleporter is up to no good. Yeah,

Erin Aquin  9:27  
and people who deny that it's going to take time, energy and resources or like they are going to make all of that magically disappear. So that you can have what you want now. I mean, think about they're always trying to sell something. We actually go in the opposite direction. Even though a lot of marketing and sales conventionally says you should tell people why working with you is going to help them get there faster and and easier, we don't pretend that the transformations people are trying to make are going to happen overnight. Because it's a point of integrity, you know, I have clients who tend to, in the grand scheme of things do things much faster than their contemporaries, because they are getting support, they are working with their mindset, they are getting thinking partnership that kind of accelerates their growth. But that only happens to the degree in which they are engaged in the process. And I, as a coach cannot ever say to someone, oh, we can fix your business in six months, we can definitely have you making $1,000,000.06 months from now, from zero to a million Sure. I've seen some people do it. But it would be totally out of integrity to promise that in my marketing, because I don't know, the money beliefs that someone's coming in, I don't know the viability of their business idea. I don't know how the pivot that they're going through is going to affect their client base. And anything else that I say, that guarantees something without being able to predict the future, which I cannot do, sorry, don't have that particular magical power. But I can promise that they're going to learn what they need to learn, in order to grow in a way that feels aligned for them. It's not as sexy as saying 0 million in six months. But it's true. And I happen to think it's why we have a successful business because we don't promise the moon, some of our clients have totally rocketed to the moon, with their own energy and their own vision. But that's because they showed up and they gave themselves the gift of getting the support they needed to do that. Yeah,

Steve Haase  12:17  
it's not because we had that weird trick, or we knew the loophole in the algorithm, or any kind of magic secret that they were then able to sprinkle upon themselves. It in the end is always going to take your own reckoning with your own resources. What is the network that you have? What is the real value that you offer? How are you standing out and being noteworthy in the marketplace? What what is the what is the system that you're using to create trust that scaled create relationships at scale? It's always going to come down to those questions. And so if you're working with someone who has a better tool, who has a better process, great, that's awesome, you should get that support. But if you're looking to them to solve your problems, or to somehow bypass one of those things I mentioned, you're you're you're heading down a dark alleyway. That's not going to be pretty. Yeah.

Erin Aquin  13:15  
And here's the thing. So I don't want to say I like to not, I like to make sure we're not saying it could never happen. Let's for some reason, say somebody's problem, you're feeling desperate, it's been a bad couple months in business, someone promises you that you'll never have to get on a prospect meeting ever again, they are going to handle your next 20 sales. This company and you don't even have to talk to the client. You don't get to know how they're going to do it. You have no idea if their values are aligned with yours. But let's say they magically can do this. You are so not in control. You are not in control of or the loophole thing like I found a loophole in the algorithm that gets you 300 More engagements on every post. Well guess what that loophole that you just paid for is probably going to go away at some point. And if you don't know how to authentically engage people, if you don't know how to make your marketing so good that maybe you don't need sales calls anymore. If you haven't figured that out internally in house, you are going to be beholden to internet people who may not be people and I've watched so many businesses become so scammy that customers that might have otherwise worked with you get so turned off that it actually takes the business.

Steve Haase  14:55  
So in the end, this is so dark I'm gonna, I'm gonna brighten that up and take it somewhere greater. Yeah, stay true to your vision. Stay true to your vision and the values that you have for how you want to get there. The kind of company that you want to build, like we talked about in the beginning, something that you love, outsourcing it to some machine where you don't know what's happening. But hopefully people are gonna come your way is not vision aligned, you're not you're not creating something with your fingerprint on it that has your reason for being your reason to create this business in the first place. Let the whole path express who you are, why you're here, what makes you different, that is going to be more attractive than, you know, some brute force direct messaging campaign that you pay for, and you're not sure what exactly is happening under the hood. Yeah,

Erin Aquin  15:49  
and and we're not saying don't get help, I think I just want to highlight this. What we're saying is, get support, get help if you can, no sales and marketing isn't your favorite thing. Sure, hire someone to help you. Write better copy or hire someone to write your copy for you. But that those people, if you notice yourself feeling pressured to buy now. What's that about? If you are hoping that someone else is going to save you in your business, even though they don't know anything about you and your business? Think twice. And when you are getting support, ask a lot of questions. You know, when we expect when we we talk to people who are considering hiring us as part of their support team as their coaches. We spend a lot of time going back and forth, answering their questions talking about the process we use finding out, you know how they work best. Some people like a lot of smart accountability, others like more freeform, being able to show up week after week with whatever's coming with them and get coached on that some people need more support with with us as thinking partners, or strategically. And we do all of that. But there are plenty of other coaches that say I only work on mindset. Don't ever ask me to look at your marketing copy. Don't ever ask me what I think you should do here. Don't ever ask me a business question. And that's what they do. And that's totally fine. But notice what people are promising. And make sure you understand before you ever pay anyone anything? How exactly they're going to deliver what they promise. If you can't answer that before you pay someone, if you don't resonate with the method in which they're going to do that for you. It's probably not going to be a good fit. I mean, I know 100% won't be a good fit, you will probably hate whatever they do.

Steve Haase  18:09  
Yeah.

Erin Aquin  18:12  
So yeah, the money and the time and the effort and the self confidence.

Steve Haase  18:18  
Be a bad story in the bad bad chapter in the story of your business book. Hopefully one that you'd be able to learn from but that's why we're here to kind of help you get those learnings ahead of time. What we do want to offer in terms of making that progress, committing to your vision, getting the help that you need, but not from a place of feeling inadequate or like someone else has the answers but from a place of real empowerment is our book we put all of those things in the Superabound book, which is now available for purchase it is finally live. And so you can get that at besuperabound.com/book or anywhere else where you like to buy your books. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time