Why That Online Course Is Going To Be A Waste Of Money

Why That Online Course Is Going To Be A Waste Of Money

How to grow when your business is fighting to stay small. 

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Have you taken a course to improve your business in some form or fashion and been sorely disappointed in the return on investment?

Maybe you took a course on how to make more sales from Instagram, but it didn’t really move the needle. Or you took courses on email marketing, digital ads, and more but you didn’t see a huge jump in your numbers.

I’ve been there before and it’s frustrating as hell when you’re trying to do the right things to grow your business, but it keeps fighting to stay small.

Now that I’m on the other side of hacking the formula for business growth, looking back on my past struggles, I can clearly see why the failed investments I made didn’t transform my business.

Here’s why that course you’re eyeing may not catapult your business’ growth and what you can do to make the right investments that will.

Incorrect Problem Framing

Let’s say that you want to get better at cooking fancy dinners. You decide to take a knife skills class because your biggest struggle right now is cutting your ingredients properly.

You take the knife skills class and get superb at cutting. You’re a pro now at dicing onions and all your veggies look beautiful when plated.

With all that focus on your knife skills, you realize that you’ve underestimated your journey. You still have 20 more steps to go before getting better at cooking fancy dinners. You still have to learn new recipes, gain new techniques for grilling, making sauces, and more.

This is the same mistake a lot of business owners make when they’re selecting resources to grow their business.

They can’t see the whole picture of the problem they’re tackling and focus on 1 out of the 20 needed steps.

When they select the wrong course or investment for their business, they’ve arrived at the wrong solution simply because they’ve framed the problem incorrectly. 

If you’ve only framed your problem to be a lack of knowledge about digital advertisements when in actuality, you don’t know much about selling online, the way you’ve framed your problem is what led you to a bad investment, not the course itself.

Respect How Big The Problem Is

We all have our individual biases on what we believe is at the root of our business problems.

Many times, we get this wrong because we usually aren’t experts in the problem we’re trying to solve. Even if you are an expert, founder bias is real — it’s hard to clearly see your business’ shortcomings when you favor it like your firstborn.

With this bias, we only see the tip of the iceberg when there’s usually a whole mess underneath as to what’s actually going to sink the business.

We think the problem is not knowing how to convert on Pinterest when it’s actually everything from your customer targeting to your email drip that’s screwing up your sales.

We think the problem is that our audience size is too small when your whole marketing and sales funnel is completely off.

To make the right investments in your business that’ll help it take off, respect how big the problem you’re tackling is — find resources that talk about the strategy lacking behind your problems rather than the tactics lacking behind it.

Tactics are the piecemeal steps you need to take in order to make things work, the strategy is what links all the tactics into a cohesive concert. 

If you don’t understand what the bigger concert is supposed to look like, the tactics you learn won’t do much good by itself. Invest in courses and programs that will help you see the big picture rather than marry you to a tactic you’re not even sure is going to solve your bigger problem. 


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Sophia Sunwoo