The truth behind the social media gurus they don’t want you to know
I’m sure we all have. We compare ourselves to seemingly successful people who show off their accomplishments on social media.
But… sure it can be a dangerous slippery slope…
You start questioning yourself.
I wonder if you’re doing the right thing.
Second, second guessing your business and marketing strategies and thinking that the grass is definitely greener on the other side of the fence.
Then the snowball builds up and starts to affect how you show up in your business.
You’d rather be doing chores than tackling your to-do list.
You lose your enthusiasm for building a business at all.
You start to think of yourself as a failure. It is not worthy of success. Something must be wrong with you. Why even bother?
All because you compared yourself to the fairy tale poster children of social media success.
The truth is that every business owner has their trials and tribulations.
Everyone struggles in one way or another.
They just don’t let you see the darker part of running a business.
They want you to see nothing but their successes, so your impression of them will always be favorable.
Heck, I certainly don’t air my dirty laundry! And it’s not because I want to hide any truth from you, or be genuinely transparent, it’s because it’s not really newsworthy.
It’s not newsworthy because it’s common.
Building a business has its ups and downs.
We all have challenging clients who don’t pay their bills for services rendered or products received.
We all have problems with people not showing up for scheduled appointments and ghosting us afterwards.
We all have a hard time recruiting new team members, struggling to find the perfect balance between skill, enthusiasm, and being aligned with our values.
And yes, I often ask myself, especially in the hiring department: Am I asking the right questions? Am I digging deep enough to foreshadow what’s to come if I hire this person? Am I paying enough to keep them motivated to stay? Am I communicating in a way that inspires them to want to do an exceptional job with each assigned task? The list goes on.
But I don’t air these questions on social media. It’s just not something I want to mention and get hundreds of opinions from people who don’t know anything about our business model and situation.
However, I have consulted HR professionals because this is their area of expertise!
My point in all of this is to warn you not to compare yourself to others on social media.
You will never get the full story of what they are going through just by reading their posts. Even the ones who say they are being totally transparent? Trust me, they are not sharing everything.
At the end of the day, all business owners are trying to run a business and make enough profit to be sustainable. They are not going to air their dirty laundry for all to judge.
In fact, there are some “gurus” who are downright misleading in what they reveal on social media. I know this because some of them have hired us to work with them. And it was not nice.
They present a false face of being wealthy, living the high life, having a successful business that allows them to travel frequently, and enjoying the epitome of what an entrepreneur aspires to be.
But that is not what is really happening.
From my experience of working with such gurus:
- They always want to pay less than my going rate, citing that it should be a privilege to work with them and the exposure alone will get me more clients. No.
- They rarely pay their bills on time.. Some don’t pay for months. Some end up declaring bankruptcy and paying nothing.
- They often operate on a “launch” business model where it’s party or famine. They spend a lot of money launching a new product or program and rely on its success to pay the pile of bills that are piling up.
- If you were successful, they happily pay back and feel good about your generosity. If the launch didn’t yield the desired results, then they won’t pay their bills and blame everyone and everything but themselves for it.
And throughout it all, they’re bragging on social media about their latest achievement and offering “sage” advice on running a successful business.
Now, not everyone is as sinister as what I just described. There are others who seem to have amazing and successful businesses and most likely do!
But comparing yourself to them is also an exercise in futility because:
- They’re not revealing all the hard work it took to get to this point of success. They can’t do this, or it would be a full time job just reporting!
- They have spent countless hours working hard long before they could say that their business was successful. It didn’t happen overnight for them nor should you think it should happen for you.
- They have a team that supports them. Whether it’s a trusted advisor, employees, and other resources in specific areas of expertise, they’re not building a successful business by themselves. I guarantee it.
So I’m advising you, please, before you start comparing your business to someone else’s, keep in mind that you don’t know the whole story. He doesn’t know the trials and tribulations they’ve been through, the lawsuits they might face, the threat of bankruptcy looming over them, or anything else they choose not to disclose on social media.
But what you can do is:
- Being in competition with yourself. This is how I have always operated. Every day I ask myself how can I be more efficient? What can I do to attract more of our ideal clients? How can I serve my team so that they feel valued? What should I do today to ensure all bills are paid? (Remember I’m the Achievement Badge Winner it is in my DNA to be competitive and the best competitor is myself).
- Have a plan. Running a business without doing your due diligence and planning first is like building on a foundation of quicksand. Make sure your business vision is viable by having a business and marketing plan that shows your vision is profitable as well.
- Spend wisely. It’s overwhelming how many options there are today when it comes to setting up your trading systems. There are dozens of newsletter service providers, hundreds of social media management systems, thousands of web hosts, etc. Before you jump into what seems like an incredible deal, ask someone who knows that space first for qualified information based on your individual needs.
- Don’t try to do it alone. You will be setting yourself up for disappointment if you do. The more you try to do things that are outside of your area of expertise, the longer and more expensive it will take to achieve your business goals.
- And if you’re thinking of spending some money now to learn what you need to know, that’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. (By the way, it’s often these gurus who sell these programs on how to build a successful business that I referred to above.)
There is a lot of hard work that goes into running a business. And the last thing you need is to be disappointed by all the positive posts and great images you see on social media.
Sure, use it as inspiration for yourself if that’s what you want to achieve, but keep in mind that there is always more lurking behind the curtain that will never be revealed. Fans of the Wizard of Oz?
For the success of your business,
Suzanne