The Black Girl Business Bar

In this episode, I’m going to dig into some of the frequent issues I see women of color facing and their underlying problems so you can address them head-on and focus on building your business.

Show Notes

Ladies, there are many things that can be holding you back from success in your business and life. Here are five mistakes that I’ve been seeing pop up for my clients, including failing to promote your offer, focusing on shiny objects, consuming too much information, comparing yourself to others, not having enough support, and suffering from imposter syndrome.

In this episode, I’m going to dig into these issues and the underlying problems so you can focus on building your business.

Resources 
More on Khalida

Khalida DuBose is a business mentor specializing in sales strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color who are early-stage online business owners as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com. Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com.

The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.

Creators & Guests

Host
Khalida DuBose
Business + Mindset Coach
Producer
Zuri Berry
Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

Welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. I'm your host, Khalida DuBose. This podcast is all about helping you as a woman of color, increase your sales, overcome your mindset blocks and giving you the practical information that you need to thrive in your business and your life.

All right friends. So today I want to give you a little bit of coaching. If you've been following me on social channels or listening to the podcast for awhile, a lot of this will sound familiar to you, but I am here repeating it again, because I know that you need to hear this.

And that is what we do in good marketing. We repeat for the people in the back. We repeat for those who are just joining us. We repeat for those who already forgot, because it takes the average adult seven plus times to hear a message and digest it. Thank you very much noisy world. So we repeat our messages often so that those who need to hear it are able to hear it and digest it.

Also today, I wanted to talk to you about this particular subject because after a few coaching calls this week, I started to hear a theme with my people. And it got me to thinking about the areas that I was stumbling on. Just a few like short years, not even years, a few short months, I'll say, you know, 6, 7, 8 months to go, you know, things that I still kind of stumble over today.

So I wanted to talk to you about the five mistakes that I see holding people back from making more money in their business. I'm also going to touch on what could potentially be the underlying belief that is going on. I don't like to tell people what their mistakes are without then diving a little bit deeper and saying like what beliefs you might be holding on to caused you to stumble.

So while you're listening to this, make sure you check in with yourself and see if any of these beliefs hold true for you. If not, can you identify any beliefs that might be holding you back as it relates to these mistakes or any other mistakes that you might be finding that you're making at your business?

Failing to promote yourself
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The first one, and these are in no particular order, is that you are not promoting your offer on a regular basis. So you guys have heard me talk about this before. And you might feel like, oh my God, I cannot keep talking about my offer. I cannot keep talking about my sales call.

I can't keep talking about my programs or my mastermind, because I sound like a broken record. But like I said at the beginning of this, we repeat often in our marketing because there are always people joining us. There are people who have forgotten. There are people who need to digest your message.

So if you're not promoting your offer on a regular basis, that is why you're not selling. Okay. That is why you're not making money. So what is a regular basis you might be wondering, and that really depends on your marketing strategy, but I will say this, I do not mean once a month, like, Hey, I'm only posting once a month, Khalida. So I am talking about my offer once a month.

Once a month is not enough because people will forget. And like I said, we repeat often, so really figuring out what is a good cadence for you to promote your offer, to talk about your offer. And that will really come down to where are you showing up? Are you showing up on multiple platforms? On one platform? Are you showing up in multiple mediums? Do you have a podcast? You know.

So it really depends on how you're showing up and all the ways in which you can think about how you can promote your offer on a regular basis.

The underlying belief here is that maybe you are not proud of your offer or your offer doesn't feel aligned with you.

So this has happened. I've talked to clients about this. Does the offer feel aligned? I've had some really breakthrough moments with a few clients in recent weeks around their offers. And so you might need to think about tweaking your offer in some way so that you feel a little bit more confident about it when you are promoting it. Or you might need to put together a proper offer so that you can start to share it with your audience. Sometimes people feel pushy when they're talking about their offer, talking about money, makes them feel uncomfortable. So that could be a problem as well. So it's really about identifying what's going on with you.

My offer in particular took me a couple months of testing price points, and really trying to nail down what it was that I did to help people and the experience that I was going to be offering them. And putting my experience together and how I wanted to help women and what were some of the outcomes. And then it made it a lot easier for me to promote the offer because I felt very confident in it.

Too much focus on shiny objects
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So the second point here is that you are focusing on shiny objects. So if you were in the online space, you have probably heard people say something about having shiny object syndrome. What this really boils down to is that a lot of times when people were new, and sometimes even after they've been around for awhile, when they're looking for answers to a problem, they enroll in courses, they buy a bunch of stuff, they download a bunch of freebies trying to figure out what the answer is.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with exploring your options or looking around, but I want you to understand that there are other entrepreneurs out there and business owners out there who have experienced that you don't. One, they know how to market.

So you might feel like, oh my God, everybody else knows what they're talking about. And I don't know my stuff. And then you find yourself in these people's programs, not because they're being dishonest, but because you don't really know what you need yet and their marketing around how they can help, and you're thinking, oh, that's the help that I need. And so then you end up in their containers. And a lot of times this creates a lot of emotions around like, oh, well that, wasn't the container for me, that didn't work out for me. Why didn't it work out for me? This person's program doesn't work.

And that's not actually what's happening. Their program works just fine for the people who actually need that program. Not you because you probably didn't need that program.

What might be happening is you're not staying focused. You don't have clarity around what you're trying to do, where you're trying to go, and what is the best way for you to get there. Not somebody else, but for you to get there. So you're focusing on everything else and what you probably need to be focusing on now, at this point, if this is how you're feeling is getting some clarity.

So a little bit of mentorship in this area, I would say get clarity around how you best learn, how you best work with clients, what you need, where you're trying to go and then pick a strategy and stick with it for some time to see if it's working. And in the midst of all this, you need to be managing your mindset in some areas as well.

Stop comparing yourself
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Point number three is that you are comparing yourself. So this is an area that I see people really struggling with. And how does this relate to not making money? Well, I'm going to be a little bit tough here before I get into that.

And I'm going to say number one, I don't like telling people to stop doing things, but I'm going to say stop doing this immediately. Stop comparing yourself to people. It is so unfair to you and it is so unfair to them, but mostly unfair to you because you're probably comparing your day one or your day 100 to somebody's day 1000.

And it's just crumbling your self-confidence. Okay. So let's not do that. We want to love on our. No more comparing yourself from this point forward. This also comes from not having clarity. A lot of times what I see when people are comparing themselves to other people is they're number one, not clear, like I said, in the last point about where they're going and what they want or how this is going to work, then they start overly consuming things.

I E. Shiny objects syndrome, or simply they're just consuming a lot of social media, right? With no strategy in place or no actual conscious reason why they're consuming. And so you become overwhelmed. And when we get overwhelmed, sometimes we spiral in one of those spirals. One of the directions that we spiral in can be to compare ourselves with other people.

You want to stop this immediately and realize that the underlying issue here is that you don't have enough clarity and you're consuming too much information without any real clear reason to be consuming.

My advice here would be to focus on clarity, once again. And realize that you will have to come back to getting clarity throughout your business journey throughout your entrepreneurial journey. But as you come back over time, you will have a lot easier time getting clear, faster, because you would have experience under your belt. You will have direction. And a lot of times you'll just be getting clarity on what's the next best step, instead of, you know, the clarity that you might be trying to get today, which is starting at 0.1 and trying to figure out the next few steps. So get some clarity, at least on your next step forward, and that should help you a lot.

Make sure you have a support system
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Point number four. Why I see people not making money is because they don't have the support they need. So you need support. You need support. And I spoke about this a couple episodes ago, when I talked about hiring support in your business.

You guys know this is a big one for me. I love being supported. Now. I didn't use to, I used to really avoid any kind of support. I didn't realize that was what I was doing, but I would just really avoid, asking people for help. And I would just superwoman the whole thing and try and do it all on my own. But no business is ever successful without support.

So I want you to let that sink in. No business is successful without support.

The key to figuring out what type of support you need is really looking at the stage that you're at. You might be new or you might've been at this for a little while and you're still confused and you need some strategic support.

Or you might need administrative support. So I consider strategic support things like mindset, help having a business coach, a life coach, some kind of high level support when you need to talk about strategy, when you need to talk about the things that are happening in your business, when things in your life come up, where you just need somebody to talk to you, hold space for you, somebody who's going to get you focused when you get off. Somebody who's accountability for you. Somebody who's going to be holding you accountable for projects that are coming up.

Or you might need administrative help where somebody is posting for you. Somebody is taking care of your newsletter. Someone's handling some of the administrative tasks, whether that's tech stuff, or they're managing your business completely. So like an online business manager.

And in some cases you'll need both. I think that all healthy businesses, businesses that are scaling, they have both.

I follow a lot of very high-end coaches, and there's one particular gentleman that I follow and coaches people who are at the eight and nine figure level.

Right. And so that really put into my mind that he doesn't. These people don't just get a coach until they make six figures and then they stop being coached. They always have that high level support because when they go from level to level, they need different types of support. Things happen in their mindsets, things happen in their lives. Right?

So, you need more support and you need to start thinking about support as kind of like an ongoing thing that's going to help you to continue to grow however you want to grow. And that's going to oftentimes be on the administrative side as well as on the strategic side.

How does this tie into support and money? When you have more support, it opens your mind to new possibilities. So new programs that you can create, new ways that you can support clients when you're not taking care of all of your marketing, when you're not taking care of all of the posting and the scheduling, in some people's cases, when you're not taking care of all of the coaching clients on your own, maybe you have a coaching manager or something.

When you're not taking care of everything on your own, it frees you up to do the thing that you're the genius at. And it also allows your business to grow because you don't have to have your hands in every little piece. If your business is a hundred pieces, and there's just one of you, how well is that business going to grow if you're the only one taking care of all of the a hundred pieces.

Take steps to address your imposter syndrome
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Alright, now I'm off my soap box and we will go to our final point. This isn't really a mistake, but you have imposter syndrome. Okay.

This is more of an underlying problem, right? You have imposter syndrome. So imposter syndrome is a huge topic that I do want to create a podcast on very soon. I'm trying to figure out how I can digest the topic and distill it down to 20 minutes before I bring it up. But I will say in this podcast that imposter syndrome in a nutshell is a phenomenon where you feel like you don't have enough of something, whether that's knowledge, expertise, experience, et cetera.

And the kicker here is that no matter how much of these things you acquire, no matter how long you're in your career, no matter how many accolades you're given or awards or how much you're published, you still think that that's not really your success. That you got lucky. That you pulled the wool over somebody's eyes. That somehow the world or these people made a mistake and that you don't deserve this.

And so how this usually shows up for women is that they go get a bunch of certifications or they're constantly learning, or they're constantly putting their sales on hold until they know more, or they don't think they can work with clients until they get just this last piece of knowledge. Or they think if I sell to people, then they'll get inside of my program and they'll realize that I'm a fraud, that I can't do this.

And I think the reason why this is so hard to identify in a lot of people is because imposter syndrome can masquerade in many different ways. And so people can't always identify that they're experiencing this phenomenon.

I have personally combated this and I'm going to share this with you as a point of coaching and mentorship. The way that I've personally battled this, is by remembering the things that I have done well.

Okay. So there's two points here. Remember the things that you've done well, and when you're doing these remembering exercises, it is as simple as getting a pen and paper. Preferably like a journal, somewhere where you can go back and look at this again and thinking about things in the past that you have done well. Think about your entire experience that you're bringing to another human being, who doesn't have the pleasure of having that experience, and now you can bring it to them so that they can learn from it.

And write those things down.

The second point is I also combat this by celebrating in the moment. From this point forward, all of the accomplishments that I am doing on a daily and weekly basis. I don't wait until the end of the month to tally them up. I don't wait until the end of the year to look back on the year and say, this is what I did well.

When I get off of a sales call, if I learned something, even if the client didn't sign, I'm congratulating myself on getting the sales call, talking to the client, helping them get a little bit of clarity.

When I sign a client, I'm congratulating myself on helping a woman to maybe potentially do her first investment in her business, and now I'm going to help her out. When I run a few miles, I congratulate myself on doing the thing that might've been hard for me to do. Okay, so you have to develop this mindset, practice and develop these practices of celebrating your accomplishments in the moment and that way they are easier to remember.

Okay, and I don't typically tell you to go backwards. One of my mentors, one thing that I really loved about her, was that she always said start where you are today. You don't have to go backwards. But in this case, I am going to tell you to go back and remember, because when you have imposter syndrome, you have forgotten your entire past.

You never gave yourself credit. You always thought that somebody was coming to discover you, that you didn't deserve all of the accolades that you have. Maybe it's easy for everybody or this wasn't such a big task. You always downplayed it. So this is the one time that I'm going to tell you to go back, give yourself the credit, and act like you're even writing it down for somebody else.

And just reflect on that.

Summary
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All right, so just really quickly, some of the reasons why you potentially may not be making money in your business, some of the mistakes that are holding you back and some of the underlying problems could be, you're not promoting the offer. You're focusing on shiny objects. You're consuming too much information, so you're comparing yourself to other people. You don't have enough support, so even though you're trying to grow the business, you're doing all these other things, which doesn't leave you time to do the most important thing, which is to make the money. And you could potentially have imposter syndrome.

And just one thing that I want to go back and say is the most important thing isn't to make the money. The most important thing is to serve your client, but you can only do that by way of making the money. Okay. So I just wanted to clarify that.

So I hope these are very helpful for you. I want you guys to reach out to me if you are experiencing any of these. I would love to get on a clarity call with you. I want you to be confident and clear on the direction that you're going. So book a call with me and we will talk more about this.

Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. If you haven't already hit the follow or subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. And if you found today's episode helpful or had any aha moments, I would love it if you would share them with us by rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or you can take a screenshot of this episode and share it on your socials.

You can also reach out to me personally at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com. I would love to hear from you. And as always, we are dropping episodes every Tuesday and we can't wait to see you back then.