The secret to productivity & success isn't a system, it's a mindset.
This bonus episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is presented by Rewind.
The secret to productivity & success isn't a system, it's a mindset. Metalsmith and entrepreneur Megan Auman returns to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast to discuss how she's cultivated an "investment mindset" and the power of mindset in business.
Key Takeaways:
Megan Auman is a jewelry designer, metalsmith, educator and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in selling art through a variety of channels. In addition to running her eponymous jewelry line, she is the founder of Designing an MBA, which features business thinking for artists and makers, and Artists & Profit Makers, an online mentorship community.
A best-selling CreativeLive instructor, her designs have been featured in Elle Decor, Better Homes & Gardens, Cooking Light and on top-rated blogs like Design*Sponge. Her newest class, Sell Without Shame, helps artists and makers find and articulate the value in their work.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
8/27/2020
Megan Auman
Kurt Elster: Today, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we’re talking to Megan Auman, who is a jewelry designer, metalsmith, educator, and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in selling art through various channels, and in addition to running her jewelry line, she’s a founder of Designing an MBA, which features business thinking for artists and makers, and Artists and Profit Makers, an online mentorship community. She’s a bestselling CreativeLive instructor. Her designs have been featured in Elle Décor, Better Homes and Gardens, Cooking Light, and on top-rated blogs like Design Sponge. Her newest class, Sell Without Shame, helps artists and makers find and articulate the value in their work. Ooh! I like that.
Megan Auman: It’s very fun.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Megan has been on the show before. We talked about similar topics, but I want to get an update from her on… It was about a year ago when she was last on, so I want to get an update on hey, I heard there’s something going on in the world. Did that affect your jewelry business number one, and then number two, the rest of this episode is about mindset. Few people understand and can articulate the real value for your business of focusing on mindset as Megan can. So, I’m obsessed with mindset because I really resisted it for a long time as self-help hocus pocus. And then I realized I was unbelievably wrong, and I would absolutely not be here without having what I had called an abundance mindset. What Megan calls an investment mindset.
So, that’s what we’re gonna talk about on the show today. Ms. Auman, how are you doing?
Megan Auman: I am good. I actually just got back from a week of fairly socially distant camping, where I didn’t open my laptop for five days. It was amazing.
Kurt Elster: And you didn’t die? No one died?
Megan Auman: No one died. It was… No one died, my business is still here. It was amazing.
Kurt Elster: Well, talk about mindset. I mean, that’s one of the things, like you build your business, build your business, then you have some spare cash to take a vacation, and you have systems in place where you can take a vacation, and then the first thing you do is spend the whole vacation working. And that’s such a mistake!
Megan Auman: Yeah. It really is, and actually, so what was funny is I told everyone I was going away, and I’m actually in the middle of running a class. I was like, “Guys, I’m going away. It’s fine.” And I didn’t even try to open my laptop. The very last morning that I was there I tried, and it turned out I couldn’t get the Wi-Fi to work anyway, so I was like, “Oh. It was meant to be the whole time.”
Kurt Elster: Good. No, what I do, I find alleviates the guilt, is I put when I’m going to be going dark on vacation, like my wife is a Disney blogger, so when we go to Disney World, it’s very serious business. So, I put like for a month in advance, I put it in my email signature, like, “P.S. I will be 100% unavailable during this time.” And then that way it’s like it’s warned everybody automatically. I don’t have to feel bad about it. And then an email autoresponder with like, “Here’s other people you can talk to,” takes care of the rest.
Megan Auman: Super smart.
Kurt Elster: But like truthfully, most people’s business, if you have to take a five-day break, no one’s gonna die. I was on Twitter with a guy who sells iPad screen protectors and he’s like, “Hey, going on vacation. Do you have a system that alerts you of wild KPI changes in your business? Because I don’t want to have to check my email.” I said, “Look, either bring the laptop with and work or don’t, but you sell screen protectors. No one’s gonna die if they can’t hear from you about their screen protector for a few days. It’s just not a big deal.”
And I think part of it is we overestimate the importance of our own business. Understandably, but again, we’re on… You mentioned vacation and immediately we’re on mindset.
Megan Auman: Exactly. Well, and I actually… So, one of the things, you mentioned putting it in your email signature. I started a week or two before I would email my list, my jewelry list, to say, “Hey, I’m gonna be gone, so if you want something, order it now or you have to wait till I get back. I’m not shipping. Because I’m not gonna be there.” And so, I think instead of using it as like, “Oh no, I’m gonna leave for a little bit.” It’s like, “You know what? I’m gonna use it as a hey guys, you want the thing? Get it now or you wait.”
Kurt Elster: I like that you turned it into urgency.
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: That’s very clever.
Megan Auman: Yeah, I’m like, “I’m a one-woman show. If I’m not home, it’s not shipping. So, there you go.”
Kurt Elster: And you’re unapologetic about it and you’re not hiding it. I think a lot of people try to hide behind weasel words like, “Here at Acme Corp, we strive…” And it’s like there’s just one of you. It’s like you and a dog.
Megan Auman: Right. That’s what I-
Kurt Elster: Like, what’s going on?
Megan Auman: One of my biggest pet peeves, especially for artists and makers. I was like, “People aren’t buying from artists because they want to buy from a big corporation, so stop pretending that you are one.”
Kurt Elster: Exactly! Yes. No, it’s this big advantage that people, especially early on, you just fight against it, and then eventually you figure out like, “Oh, it’s me they’re buying from, not something else.” All right, I heard there’s a pandemic afoot.
Megan Auman: A little.
Kurt Elster: How has this affected your business?
Megan Auman: So, what’s interesting is for me, it hasn’t had that big of an impact because I’ve spent the last however many years moving the majority of my business online. So, the biggest impact in my business for sure has been the wholesale side and selling to stores, so that pretty much dove off a cliff when this started. The one exception is I sell through a catalog, and that’s… Those numbers have been consistent with what they’ve always been.
But so, the store thing kind of fell off a cliff. I also let it fall off a cliff if I’m being perfectly honest, because I do have lots of online ways to make money, and I know a lot of other artists and makers don’t, so I was like, “You know what? Other people can still,” and stores are still buying, because stores still need to make money, but I was kind of like, “I’m gonna focus on the online sides of my business right now, because I have them.” And so, my wholesale is down, but my teaching income is steady, because people are home and they want to learn things, and it turns out that people are very happy to buy jewelry online in a pandemic, because they’re at home and they’re bored.
Kurt Elster: It’s retail therapy.
Megan Auman: Right, it’s retail therapy, and so that side of my business has actually been up, at least when I pay attention to it, which is something that I think we’ll talk about when we talk about investment mindset. But so, when I actually am doing the work, that side of the business is up, because people really… They want to spend money. Humans like to shop. I think this is something we don’t talk about enough. Humans like to shop. And so, if they can’t go to a store, they’re gonna shop online. It’s just who we are as people.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you’re right. It might be like an innate behavior of just like hunting and gathering. Like just as my pet rabbit can find any tunnel you didn’t know you had amongst your furniture, humans want to gather stuff. We have an innate need to acquire things, and there’s like that… It’s self-reinforcing in that you get a dopamine rush by making the purchase, and then one by receiving it in the mail, and then if you’re a Instagram Stories-addicted nutcase like I am, from making a 16-second video to share the purchase with the world. Right?
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: So, it becomes, like it’s very easy to in times of stress, like we are now, to just purchase some silly shit online. And it got weird enough for us where we have embraced it unashamedly and then set budgets for it and my wife and I talk about it. She’s like, “Look, Halloween’s around the corner. We need to… Let’s just go crazy on Halloween décor for something to do.” Because as a travel blogger, she’s got some free time. And so, we decided, like I got an Amazon gift card and I said, “All right, this Amazon gift card is your Halloween décor budget. Go.” Right?
And so, once you take the shame out of it and embrace it, but also make it sane. She’s not just buying random four dozen pairs of leggings kind of thing. No, Halloween décor, we’ll get years out of that, and it’s good for the kids.
Megan Auman: Yeah, I started out by being like, “I’m gonna spend this pandemic spending as much money on art as I can.”
Kurt Elster: There you go.
Megan Auman: I’m a big ceramics fan, like I have a lot of mugs, and I have all these plants, so now I’m like, “I need planters.” So, I was basically like, “I’m going to without shame buy as much ceramics as my budget allows for.” And so, like some of my friends who I’ve been buying a lot from, they’re like, “You’ve been buying so much.” And I was like, “Yeah, because I decided that was part of my pandemic job. I’m just gonna buy all the art and it’s gonna be good.”
Kurt Elster: All right, what is your dumbest pandemic purchase?
Megan Auman: Oh. You know, I don’t actually… I feel like other than art, I haven’t been buying that much. Like my-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you can’t call art purchases dumb.
Megan Auman: No, they’re not. They’re not at all.
Kurt Elster: No.
Megan Auman: Okay, here’s what I… I do know what I did. So, I was looking to buy plants on Etsy, because all my local greenhouses were closed, and so I had put a bunch of plants in my shopping cart, and then the next day I went and I was like, “Oh man, all the plants that I put in my shopping cart are gone, like someone else must have bought one.” So, then I was like, “Oh, but I really want this one plant,” so I went and ordered that one plant and a couple other things from this store, and then I realized that the reason they weren’t in my cart is because I bought them the day before.
So, I actually bought like essentially two of the same plant. So, that was my dumb purchase, because I was so excited about buying plants that I forgot that I had already bought them.
Kurt Elster: There was just a shift overall, not necessarily a change, like, “Okay, wholesale down, but not gone, and then online, DTC, Etsy, that stuff up.” And as people are more interested in jewelry making or entrepreneurship, as they’re at home and have time to do it and having the extra income might add a little anxiety relief for a lot of us, certainly, it sounds like things have shifted there, as well.
Megan Auman: Yeah, and what’s sort of ironic for me is that that was my plan all along for 2020. My plan was to focus on those areas of my business and then the pandemic was just like, “Well, now you have to.” So, I do feel really fortunate in that that hasn’t shifted for me, and then it’s actually, in a lot of ways it’s been really weird, because my husband works in manufacturing. He’s the manager of the shop floor. So, other than a couple of days where they were sorting out the logistics, he’s been going to work the entire time, so my day to day hasn’t actually changed that much other than that I don’t see people, which is a little bit sad. It’s a lot bit sad.
But I’m still doing-
Kurt Elster: So, that’s how it’s impacted you. How do you… Do you think it’s been similar for other jewelry makers?
Megan Auman: Yes and no. So, for those who were selling predominantly in person, so those who had really big wholesale businesses or doing a lot of shows, it’s been tough. It’s been a real challenge and I see that in some of my friends who, just because of the way they’ve structured their businesses, online was a thing they’ll get to eventually, because the in-person stuff was working. And suddenly all of that ground to a halt and so that’s been really hard.
But then the ones that I know that have focused on the online side of their business, they’re experiencing what I’m experiencing, where their sales are up. And of course, there’s the other challenge that I’m seeing a lot, which is basically like what is your relationship for those who have kids, what’s your relationship and your childcare situation?
Kurt Elster: Right.
Megan Auman: Because that has had a big impact. And so, I know in my online mentorship program, Artisan Profit Makers, some of the people that I work with, they have school-age children and so they were used to being able to work on their businesses when the kids were at school, and suddenly that went away. Whereas I have another woman in my community who she has… Her son’s like pre-K age, but her husband works in the entertainment industry, and so he works on a TV show, and so that production was shut down, so her husband has been home this entire time and she’s been able to really pour herself into her online busines, and so her sales are up and she’s having the best year she’s ever had, but it’s because her childcare situation flip flopped. Her husband was able to take care of the kid all day and she could focus on the business.
So, I’m really seeing a lot, and there’s a lot of… Back to the mindset thing. There’s been a lot of guilt that I’ve been seeing with artists and makers who suddenly have had to do full-time childcare and they’re like, “I’m not getting stuff done in my business.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a pandemic and your kids are home all day. Cut yourself a little slack.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Honestly, one of the most empowering things anyone ever said to me was five, six years ago now, a therapist said, “Kurt, your too hard on yourself.” And I’ll never forget it. I mean, it really was a very freeing thing to find out like, “A lot of the things you feel bad about, guilty about, criticize yourself about, that’s you criticizing yourself. That’s a choice. You don’t actually have to do it and you can forgive yourself in much the same fashion.”
And it’s very freeing. You don’t get a lot of productivity out of beating yourself up, right? So, being aware of it and recognizing that guilt, and trying to forgive yourself for it, can be quite empowering.
So, for some of these folks in your community who are struggling, how do you help them? What do you do for them? What do they do?
Megan Auman: Yeah. Well, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head right there, which is just to forgive yourself. So, that’s… We’ve done a lot of mindset work this year, because we need it, because there’s… No one really knows how to respond, right? What we’re doing, is happening in the world, is so different from anything we’ve experienced, and so this reiteration over and over and over again of cutting yourself some slack and reminding yourself that this too shall pass. And I think there’s this feeling of like… Going back to the thing about it’s okay to take a break, because your business is still gonna be there, if you have to focus on taking care of your kids, or a family member, or something, whatever it is, yeah. In this moment it feels like, “Oh my God, I’ve lost all momentum and whatever.” But that’s not true. You can take steps back. You can take breaks.
You know, this was something… In a lot of ways, I feel fortunate to have… Fortunate’s not the right word, but a lot of the lessons that I think people are having to learn this year are lessons that I learned eight years ago when my mom died, and so I learned how to move through grief, and I learned how to step back from my business, and then the realization that I stepped back because I had to, because I just couldn’t function. And then I came back to it and it was okay. And so, I think just talking about that, that like you know what? Sometimes life gets in the fucking way, and we have to deal with that, and it’s okay, because your business will be there. Especially if you’ve put things in place, like your email list.
Okay, so you go away for a little bit, but you still have your people, and they’re still gonna support you when you come back.
Kurt Elster: And not to trivialize negative or tragic experiences, but like being able to take a vacation, walk away from your business, come back and see it’ still there, that’s like practice mode for what if something tragic or something big happens in your life that you can’t ignore, that you have to step away from your business?
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: And take care of, and then return to your business, and find, “Ah, it still exists. I’m still here. I’m still the same person.” And I find often people are extremely understanding if you are direct and honest about personal experiences. Recently, I had a… Occasionally, I know, people are complicated, so occasionally I have to have… We lovingly call them principals talk moments with clients, but like get them on the phone and have a discussion and say, “Hey, here’s what’s going on with me. Here’s how I feel right now.”
And whether that’s because you are lagging on a project because of something you’re dealing with, or something the client’s doing is in some way impeding you, I have never… I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad experience from just being honest and direct about my own experiences with someone else.
Megan Auman: Yeah. I think, and you know, we’ve reached this mode where we think like, “Oh, I can’t.” On one hand, everything’s supposed to be authentic, but on the other hand, we feel like we can’t be real humans, with emotions and lives. Like in the class that I’m running right now, in Sell Without Shame, I had a woman who… She came on and she was like, “I wanted to apologize because I didn’t do the homework yet, because we had to put my dog down this weekend.” And I was like, “You don’t have to apologize to me. That sucks and it’s like…” And I can say this as someone who, like two years ago we had to put our dog down, and I was not prepared for how hard that would be. As someone who lost a parent, I was like, “Wait, this is hard too.”
But just this feeling that she paid me to take this class and felt like she had to come in and apologize for not doing the work in a timely fashion because she was dealing with something in her life. And it just kind of makes me wonder, like is this really where we’re at in humanity? And so, I think that’s a big part of the work that I’ve been doing with my people this year, and it’s a shift I think we need to make, is this idea that you are a human running your business, and you can’t separate those two things, so stop trying. Let’s acknowledge that we’re human.
Kurt Elster: Embrace it.
Megan Auman: Embrace it, that life is messy, that sometimes you have to deal with stuff, and just acknowledge that, because like you said, people are understanding if you’re just honest.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, they’ve… Many times, and I think in most situations, people have had similar experiences and can empathize and relate. And that’s what makes it work.
All right, we have established the importance of forgiving yourself, of being not so hard on yourself, especially in an unprecedented and bizarre time that is 2020. And really, the dumpster fire that is 2020.
Megan Auman: Yeah. Tell it like it is.
Kurt Elster: Yes. And at the same time, also getting everything, you can out of all of your unfair advantages. So, maybe being trapped in your house and unable to do other things is an unfair advantage in that now you could focus on a thing that you wanted to do for yourself or your business.
So, now let’s move deeper into mindset. When we talk about mindset, what do we mean? What do you… What are you discussing?
Megan Auman: Yeah, so I think when we’re talking about mindset, we’re literally talking about the approach that you bring to your business or to your life, and essentially whether or not you’re putting up roadblocks, which we don’t often even realize we’re putting up, right? So, it’s the way that your thought patterns impact whether or not you send the email to your list, or you pitch your work to something, or even getting your website set up in the first place.
So, it’s all just those thoughts that we have, and a lot of times they’re so ingrained that we don’t even realize that you’re having them. And so, we have to look at the mental stuff, because this goes back to what we were just talking about. We’re not robots running businesses. We’re humans running businesses. And if you’re a human running a business, you have to acknowledge that you have human thoughts, and some of those thoughts might actually be holding your business back.
Kurt Elster: Yes. You are not purely rational software.
Megan Auman: No!
Kurt Elster: Making observations. You are really just a cholesterol-based, organic, self-aware monstrosity inside a human robot suit. I mean, that’s really what your brain is.
Megan Auman: And the fact that we pretend that we make rational decisions all the time is such a… It’s such bullshit. So-
Kurt Elster: That is the most insidious part, isn’t it?
Megan Auman: Right. I remember, I was giving a talk once, pre-pandemic days, so in a room with real people, and I was talking about the idea of selling with story and emotion, but it was at… The talk was happening at a trade show. And so, I remember a woman raised her hand and she was like, “Okay, so I get that if you’re selling directly to customers, but if I’m selling to store buyers,” she’s like, “Aren’t they making rational purchasing decisions?” And I just laughed. I was like, “That is amazing that you think that humans make rational purchasing decisions even if it’s a B2B decision.” I was like, “We don’t. You might justify a purchase rationally, but we’re really not that rational. We make quick, snap decisions based on lots of factors that have nothing to do with logic.”
And personally, I think that we’re better off when we admit that instead of pretending that every decision we make is rational.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. Once you embrace it, I think that’s step one. And then for me, step two, like step one was going, “Hm, everything I do is not… is so rooted in just irrational decision making, as much as I’d love to view myself as a pragmatic person, you just can’t help it.” And so, I think step one is accept that truth. Step two then is try and… For me, was try and become understanding and aware of cognitive biases. Like the one I think we all suffer from, and I know I did, was recency bias. I’d be like, “Oh, my business is in the toilet.” And really it was like, “Well, no. In 72 hours, you had a few mildly things happen, but the previous 90 days were amazing!” But it’s like recency bias, that’s what it does to you.
So, that’s one that I suffer with often. So, what do we do with this? Once we’ve acknowledged that we are not meaty computers, but irrational animals, what’s step two there?
Megan Auman: Yeah, so I think step two is to then… You have to pay attention to your internal thoughts, which I know sounds super obvious, but is actually not something that we’re taught to do, right? We’re taught to suppress emotion, and not do that, and a lot of people don’t actually have… What’s the word for like literally having that understanding of self? A lot of people-
Kurt Elster: Mindfulness?
Megan Auman: Maybe mindfulness. A lot of people lack that, like that… It’s emotional intelligence, but it’s emotional intelligence reflected on yourself. I mean, a lot of people lack emotional intelligence in relationship to other people, as well.
Kurt Elster: Unfortunately. Yes.
Megan Auman: Unfortunately. But we lack it for ourselves, and so I think part of that is literally paying attention to your inner monologue and saying like, “Wait, this is really what I’m thinking?” And then the other thing for me that I try to encourage people to do is if you have these biases, if you have these thoughts, most of the time it’s not you, it’s cultural programming. It’s the things that come into us from our parents, from society at large, from living in a racist, sexist society, and so let’s look at and examine where these mindsets come from, because I think sometimes it’s helpful to understand that what you’re thinking, it’s not actually your fault that you’re thinking it. So, I have-
Kurt Elster: And that’s where… So, it’s awareness, that’s where the awareness comes in, is recognizing it and knowing where that’s coming from. And I’ll give you a good example, and then the second part is that forgiveness where you go, “Okay, well this is… I was programmed to think that. I’m not gonna feel guilty about it.”
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: What am I gonna do about it instead? But all right, here’s an example. I, I’m not sure if you’re aware, host a podcast. And part of that podcast, I get a lot of guest applications, and I will tell you, women, or men wildly outnumber women in these applications. And I’ve asked a lot of people about this, and a woman who does PR professionally even said this to me outright, unprovoked. My wife’s told me this. Lots of folks. Women are conditioned by society to not put themselves out there in general, and that’s really… It is societal conditioning that is causing me to receive way more men application than women. So, like I generally have to reach out to find women or get them through warm introductions. That was so close to being a binders full of women moment.
Megan Auman: I think that it’s true, and so you examine those, so another good example is there’s a woman in my community who we worked on… She has different types of jewelry, so she has some jewelry that’s one of a kind, where she’s making the whole thing herself, and then she has some jewelry where she’s having a component cast, and so it’s less labor on her part and actually better profit margin, and personally she loves this jewelry. It’s like the jewelry she wears all the time. But she feels guilty for promoting it because the profit margin is higher. And I was like, “Okay.”
Kurt Elster: Weird.
Megan Auman: Right. I was like, “We need to unpack all the layers of this.” And so, she was like, “Well, okay. I think this is the mindset that comes from my parents, because my parents have this belief that you only deserve to make money if you’re working hard.” And I was like, “Okay, well that’s really great that we understand that you got this from your parents, but let’s unpack that further and understand that your parents got this from capitalism.” Because this is a myth that the people who run capitalism want us to believe, right? They want the working class to feel like the only way to get ahead is to work really hard, which is a total myth, because the people who succeed in capitalism are the people who don’t actually work that hard.
And so, I was like, “We have to literally look at all of these layers and understand that where your mindset starts, that’s holding you back, but let’s really unpack all of the things.” So, like you said, you can forgive yourself. You’re not a bad person because you feel guilty for making money or selling a piece that has more profit margin. You have these beliefs because there’s so much more to the world, and so once you understand that, then you can let it go and you can be like, “You know what? This necklace is awesome, and I deserve to make money from it.”
Kurt Elster: And sometimes it could even be religion, like Protestant work ethic is famous for making feel guilty about not working hard, right?
Megan Auman: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s so much there. But yeah, like guilt about making a profit. I used to do freelance coaching and have conversations like, “Kurt, I want to raise my hourly rate.” Okay, what do you have to do that? They’re like, “I have to do X, Y, and Z, and then…” No, you don’t. You just do it. Why can’t you just do it? And they’re like, “Wait, I can?” And so, a lot of business mindset or investment mindset is really just giving yourself permission. So, it’s like all right, if you can recognize the bias, forgive yourself, all right, step three then is give yourself permission to do the thing you want to do.
Megan Auman: Exactly. And I think that is… That’s part of the challenge, especially if you’re conditioned to need approval or need permission, and then suddenly someone’s like, “No. You get to give yourself permission. You are actually the only one that’s in charge of you.” And that’s one of the things that I teach a lot when I teach wholesale, and I think we talked about this a lot in our first interview.
So, like when I teach artists and makers how to reach out to stores, and they’re like, “Okay. Well, so my terms and conditions, what should they say?” And I’m like, “You set the rules. They should say whatever you want them to say, because ultimately you set the rules in your own business.” And that’s not something we’re used to hearing, right? You think like I have to play by other people’s… No. You run a business. You get to set the rules. You set the policies. And it comes down to that permission piece of until someone… It’s sad, because it’s like until someone gives you permission for you to give yourself permission, you don’t realize that you can.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Oh, exactly. You’re like, “Well, I got…” It could be you’re waiting for… You have all these authority figures in your life that you have to get permission from to do things. And you know, first it’s your parents, and then unless you went to Montessori school, it’s probably years of teachers, and then you get your first jobs, and it’s, “Well, I gotta get permission from my boss to take a day off.” And you have to unlearn all that stuff. It’s insane! But I have several friends who sell info products not unlike yourself, and a lot of them fully admit that the real value in purchasing an info product and going through it is like you’ve raised your hand, said, “I’m interested in doing X with my business. I have found a resource on how to do it. I read it. And then lo and behold, I was able to do it!” You were probably able to do it the whole time, it was just by reading the book, you were able to give yourself permission.
Megan Auman: Yeah. It is… I think that’s totally true. And I like to joke that I’m very pragmatic when I teach business, but at the same time, I’m like my role in teaching business is like 50% pragmatic and 50% therapy, because we have to-
Kurt Elster: Yes! Business therapy!
Megan Auman: Right. That’s really what I’m doing, and it’s taken me… It took me a long time to kind of understand that, but it is so much of what we’re doing, because you do. You get in your own way. I still even fall into that trap, like I remember I went through a period where I wasn’t sleeping well, and so I was going to an acupuncturist to try to help me work through that, and I was telling him. I was like, “Oh, I’m just so tired around 2:00 every day, and how do I push through that?” He was like, “You’re self-employed, right?” I was like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Take a nap!”
I was like, “Oh. Wait. I’m allowed to do that.” And so, it’s funny how even if you’re good at giving yourself permission and not listening to authority, it’s so ingrained in our society that even sometimes I have to be like, “Oh, wait. I’m allowed to do that.”
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah. I’m allowed to do it. I give myself permission. I don’t have to ask for anybody. I don’t have to look for anything. I can just make the decision and take action and I don’t have to have guilt about it. So, if I can get that far, which for me, that probably… I probably didn’t figure that out until like three, four years ago, truthfully, like really truthfully adopted it. For you, you’ve… I know you mentioned investment mindset. How does investment mindset apply to your business?
Megan Auman: Yeah, so I think that for me, the idea of investment mindset was like ingrained in my business pretty early. So, actually I should… I’m gonna backtrack. It was ingrained in me well before I ever started my business. So, my dad owns a machine shop that was founded by my grandfather, and my dad took it over probably when I was very, very young, and so he basically went from my grandfather was like old school machinist with a lathe, and everything was handwritten in his little ledger. I found it. It was so cool. I was like, “Oh my God, this is the notes from when my grandfather started his business in the ‘40s.” It was amazing.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I love it.
Megan Auman: But so, then my dad was like, “Okay, well, if machining is going to survive, we have to update to CNC and computer and all of those things. And so, he made big investments in the business, and so I remember when I was a kid, one time my mom was like, “Yeah, I have to go into the bank today to meet your dad so we can sign a loan on a half-a-million-dollar machine. And like, that was… Right. And so, that was the environment I grew up in, where like I understood that it takes money and effort, my dad worked a lot too, it takes money and effort to run a business, or to start a business, or to in my dad’s case, very much overhaul the nature of a business. And so, I grew up understanding that, which I feel so lucky to have grown up in that environment, because that takes a lot of baggage out right there.
But then I remember early in my business, I wanted to do… I was already doing the New York Gift Show as a trade show, but I wanted to move into a different section, with this bigger booth, and so I got in, and I got my contract, and the booth was $10,000. Now, for anyone that’s thinking about doing a trade show, just for the record, they don’t all cost that much money, but in this particular case, the booth fee was $10,000, and I was like, “Well, I don’t know what to do about that.” So, I remember I called my dad and I’ll be totally honest, I was really just hoping he was gonna lend me $10,000, like I just thought if I was like, “Hey, I need $10,000,” he would be like, “Okay.”
So, I called him, and I was like, “I need $10,000 to do this show.” I was like, “What do I do?” And he was like, “You call the bank and you ask for a loan.” And I was like, “Oh. Right. That’s what businesses do.” Like in hindsight, obviously I’m so glad that he didn’t just give me $10,000, because the lesson was so much better of like, “Oh, right.” Sometimes these are things that you have to do to move your business forward. And I think that in this age of the internet, and not to throw Chris Guillebeau under the bus or anything, but the $100 Startup and all these things, we think that, “Oh yeah. I can start a business for free and it’s just gonna magically work.” And even on the internet, where yes, things are not as expensive as a $10,000 trade show booth, that’s still not the case. You still have to make an investment.
Kurt Elster: Yes. It’s a hard thing to accept, but that’s the case. If you’re not in the position to do it yet, you’re not in the position to do it yet. Just don’t… Forcing it, you’re just gonna struggle and spin your wheels. So, what… Is there a framework you use to make these big financial decisions? Like I realized the safety net, the security of having a line of credit. I keep a personal line of credit unused, a business line of credit unused, because should I need to weather some cashflow issue, I can.
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: But I could, so that’s why I have it for me, is just I’m extremely risk averse, and for me it’s an additional safety net. However, most people would use those loans to… They would leverage that debt and invest in themselves, right? I’ve not done that. How do you approach these big financial decisions? Like I could build a team of 10 people in a month if I really wanted to and I’ve chosen not to. Partly because it scares the shit out of me. So, what, how do you make these financial decisions?
Megan Auman: So, for me, the way that I’ve always made them, and again, this is where I started. When I started my business, it was like ’06, ’07, so Etsy was a thing, but it was just barely a thing. So, for me, starting my business meant doing craft shows, doing art fairs, doing trade shows, but the metric that I’ve always used in making investments is like, “Is this putting me in the space of a revenue-generating activity?”
So, like if I spend this money, is this something where I am not guaranteed to make money back, because as we know, that’s not the case. But is it likely to make me money back? I think that’s one thing, and then the second thing is like is it going to put me in front of an audience that I could not have reached on my own? And so, those are the two factors, so like now, this is a good example. I do a lot of podcasts because I pay someone to pitch podcasts for me. I am the opposite, I think, of a lot of women, where I’m like, “This is an opportunity and I want to do it.” But I also… I don’t have time. I don’t have anymore time. So, I pay for someone to do it for me, and that’s now… It happens to be the person I pay her company is a very good friend of mine, so that helps.
But at the end of the day, I’m like, “This is putting me in front of an audience that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.” And that’s, so like those two things. Is there potential for revenue? And is this putting me in front of an audience that I wouldn’t have had otherwise? Those are really the two factors for me, and so if you look at like anytime I’ve invested in things in my business, whether that’s doing retail craft shows, whether that’s doing a trade show, whether that’s paying someone to pitch podcasts for me, they usually fit in those two metrics.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I sounds like when you’re making these decisions, you’re asking yourself, “Is this an investment or an expense?” And that’s really not a thing I started consciously doing in that sense until like the last year. And so, you look and you’re like, “Investment or expense? Oh, I could spend three grand on a really, really specced out laptop.” That’s expense.
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: It’s not an investment. Hiring, putting someone on retainer to just book you on podcasts to expand your audience and get you backlinks and good PR, that’s an investment.
Megan Auman: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re saying, “All right, if I have a plan for this and I have reasonable confidence that this could work, and I have access to the money, and there’s a clear return on investment path here, why would I not make that jump?”
Megan Auman: Exactly. And I think that investment versus expense, that’s such a good way to do it, and if we go back to the example of my dad buying a half-a-million-dollar machine, that’s that same metric, right? You don’t buy a half-a-million-dollar machine because it sounds like fun. You buy a half-a-million-dollar machine because that’s going to enable you to take on more work, which will then generate more revenue. So, that’s not an expense. It’s an investment.
And so, I think that… I’ve never put it that way, but I think that’s such a smart way to put it, and so I think that’s the way I look at things, and because of that, I don’t spend. I know, good call there. I don’t spend money on some of the things that other people do, like I do… Now, part of this is like fun, like I do all my own photography for my site, for my jewelry. I also do it because I personally like photography and as you and I discussed before we jumped on live, I love photography gear, that’s just a thing that I love.
But for me, it was always like I would always rather figure out ways to invest if they’re gonna put me in revenue-generating opportunities, rather than trying to do… I think people spend money to polish and make perfect, so they’re like, “Oh, I have to have my website perfect before I can promote.” No!
Kurt Elster: And it turns out that’s like one of the… As a web designer, it pains me to admit it, but it’s one of the least important things as far as revenue-generating activities go. It’s icing on the cake. It’s like obsessing over the book cover instead of the book.
Megan Auman: Right. And so, and like yes, you do, I mean especially to sell online and especially to sell art, your photography has to be good. It has to do all those things. But like I’ve had lots of shitty versions of my website that have still made me money, and I think that’s the other thing. If we’re gonna talk about investment mindset, it’s this idea of like figuring out how to again, drive revenue, put yourself in front of an audience, even if you don’t feel ready or especially if you don’t feel ready. Like when I… Every time I’ve done a trade show, so when I first did New York Gift Fair, before I’d had the $10,000 booth, I had like a $2,500 booth, and they… I applied to the show thinking it was gonna take me a while to get in and I would have time, and they called me in November, and they said, “Hey, we have a booth in January for a new jewelry designer. Do you want it?” And I said yes. And then I hung up the phone and I was like, “Shit. What’d I just do? Now I have like three months to get ready.”
And it was super stressful, but if I had waited until I was like “ready” to do a trade show, you and I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now, because I wouldn’t have a business. I think that is the most important thing when it comes to mindset is that you have to just do things and you have to do things before you feel ready, and you have to do things before they are perfect, because guess what? Nothing’s ever gonna be perfect. Your website is always a work in progress. Always and forever, it’s a work in… Everything about your business is always and forever a work in progress.
And so, once you understand that, then you’re like, “Okay. Well, then what’s my job? My job is to figure out how to make money, and the way that I’m gonna figure out how to make money is to say this is what I’m selling, and here’s who I’m selling it to, and I’m gonna do my best to in all the ways possible get my work in front of those people.”
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s the drop. That’s the mindset. I love it. Yeah. It’s embracing that it will always be imperfect, and you will always be improving it, and if you get to a point in your business where you look at the last two, three years and go, “This, nailed it! All set.” You’re not advancing. That’s a red flag in itself. You should look back on what you did two, three years ago and go, “Oh, God.” Right?
Megan Auman: Right.
Kurt Elster: You should be getting better and constantly improving. Like I’m getting to the point where I think I want to redo our websites. If I listen to episodes of this podcast prior to say like 2019, I find a lot of it just cringeworthy, right? Because I’ve gotten better at it with experience and skill.
All right. We could do another 20, 30 minutes easy. And I would, but I’ve got another meeting I gotta get on in 10 minutes. All right, so quickly, one of the smart things you’ve done, and you touched on it at the start of the episode was you don’t have a single income source in your business. I do the same thing. I think it’s really smart. Because as I’ve established, I’m risk averse. So, you can, just as you would diversify your portfolio given the opportunity, your business’s income sources are like that portfolio. You can diversify them. Run me through quickly all the ways that your business can generate revenue.
Megan Auman: Yeah, so first of all, I do want to say what’s funny is that I have all those different ways of doing revenue, and it’s not because I’m risk averse. I’m actually like… I’m risk averse in certain things, but in business, I’m not at all, which probably again comes from like, “Oh, we have to go buy a half-million-dollar machine.” So, I’m like, “Oh yeah, it’s fine. I’ll figure it out.” For me, it’s this feeling of like I just… I always want to do all the things, and so it’s a natural inclination to want to be like, “Okay, well, when I get bored,” this is actually what it comes down to. When I get bored, I like that I have the ability to focus on a different area.
And so, for me, all the areas that I have that I can generate revenue, so I sell my jewelry online through my online shop, which is built on Shopify, so I sell there. I do wholesale my jewelry, so I sell to stores and I also sell through a catalog and a website called Artful Home, which has been a super awesome relationship, because again, revenue generating, puts me in front of people. And then in my kind of the info side of the business, in the Designing an MBA side, I have my mentorship community, so that’s something that I run that’s recurring monthly revenue, which… Super nice to have that. I’m not gonna lie.
And then I have my classes, which are not a purely passive product, because I am a very hands-on teacher, as evidenced by the fact that I’m like, “It’s 50 teaching and 50% therapy.” So, I’m like super hands on, and then I do have a few passive products, so I have my eBook and a few kind of older, digital products that I sell, and then I also have all my classes that I ran on CreativeLive, which are kind of awesome, because people still take them. They’re still good. Though a few of them, like you said, looking back on your old work, I’m like, “Ooh, that one’s like-“
Kurt Elster: Yeah, they start to age.
Megan Auman: Yeah, I did a Pinterest one on there which is like… It filmed in 2014. Pinterest is very, very different now, so that one I’m like, “Don’t buy that one anymore.” So, I have those, but that still also generates revenue for me. Yeah, and I do one-on-one coaching from time to time. I don’t do a lot of it, because I try to actually funnel people into my mentorship program, because it’s a much better use of their money, but I do that, as well.
So, I have all kinds of things that I do.
Kurt Elster: I know the answer to this question, but do you like everything you do?
Megan Auman: I do. Because I have worked very hard to eliminate the things that I don’t. So, I think that’s the final piece of mindset maybe that we need to talk about, which is that like you’re allowed to love your business, and you’re allowed to love every part of it, and if you don’t love it, you either cut it out, or you pay someone else to do it for you. And I think that’s something that I spend a lot of time being like, “Is what I’m doing today making me happy?” That’s not a question that we think about asking ourselves, but I think it’s so important in building your business. And so, I started out doing outdoor craft shows and I was like, “This sucks. I don’t want to do this.” And so, my mindset was like, “There’s gotta be a better way to make a living.”
So, anytime that I don’t love something, I figure out either can I get paid way more for it, that’s also a trick that I use, like just up the price a lot, because it’s… If you’re making jewelry and you’re like, “I don’t really love this line.” I’m like, “Well, would I love it more if I was getting paid a lot more?” And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. So, if the answer is yes, I jack up the price. If the answer is no, I cut those designs from my line.
But I spend a lot of time focusing on like am I doing things that make me happy? And if they don’t, I cut them. Even if they make me money.
Kurt Elster: Yes. So, I think that’s the final important piece, is look at what you’re good at. You want the overlap of like, “These are things I’m good at and things I like to do.” Those are things you should own in your business. Everything that doesn’t fall into that overlap in the Venn diagram, can you get rid of it? Can you outsource it? Can you get paid enough for it to make the pain worthwhile? But whatever you do, the thing that will make you resent your business and procrastinate is banging your head against the stuff doing things that you don’t like, that you’re not good at, don’t pay well. Again, it’s your business. Do what you want with it as long as it’s moral and ethical, just do what you want, and things will go much more smoothly.
It seems like obvious advice, but I think we’ve all done things that we were like, “Shouldn’t have said yes to that.”
Megan Auman: Right, and when I tell people like, “Your business is allowed to make you happy.” They’re like, “What?” Like, “Really?”
Kurt Elster: Yeah!
Megan Auman: It’s like conditioning. But we’re also, we’re so ingrained to this idea that like work is supposed to make you miserable, and I get-
Kurt Elster: Insidious.
Megan Auman: This is where I’m so fortunate to have grown up in an environment where I remember my dad, like he worked all the time, but he also… He really likes to work, because he was really passionate about what he did. And I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, passionate about machining?” But he was, or he is, and so I think-
Kurt Elster: They’ve clearly never met an engineer. I get excited about like a water jet machine.
Megan Auman: Right!
Kurt Elster: Oh, I love those.
Megan Auman: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Kurt Elster: Those CNC machines. They’re fun.
Megan Auman: That’s the thing is like you are allowed to love your work. But we live in a culture that tells us that you can’t, so like you… If you went from working in job, or even being in a school that you didn’t love, and now you’re like, “Well, my business is kind of making me miserable, but that’s how work’s supposed to be, right?” No!
Kurt Elster: No!
Megan Auman: It’s not. Figure out how to make what makes you happy in your business, and yes, it also needs to make you money in order to have a business, but if it’s not making you happy, it’s not worth the money.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely, and I think the final piece is if you’re like early in your business and you’re going, “Well, it’s easy for them to say, they have survivorship bias.” Right? We have survived to the other side. I’ve been doing this 11 years now. Figure out what you want to do, what you have to do to get there, but just keep showing up for two years. It will probably take you about two years to get traction in most businesses, so that’s my final piece of advice, is like we’ve painted a very positive picture, but it’s gonna take work.
Megan Auman: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You gotta put in the time. And there’s just… There really is not a way around it.
Megan Auman: For sure. And I like to tell people, like I had fairly early business success, like within a couple of years, but I also spent seven years in school studying metalsmithing and developing my line before I launched my business, so you have to take everybody’s quick success stories with a grain of salt, because somewhere usually behind it is a lot of hard work and probably not a lot of money in the beginning.
Kurt Elster: Megan, where can people go to get more of your wonderful advice?
Megan Auman: So, they can go to if you’re specifically interested in the business things, you can go to DesigningAnMBA.com, where you can find lots and lots of blog posts. I’m a writer at the end of the day. It took me a long time to acknowledge that, but I really do love to write, so lots of blog posts, access to all of my classes, and then you can also go to MeganAuman.com, where you will find my jewelry, you’ll be able to get to my online store, you can also find my classes there, because I’m not dumb. So, you can find them everywhere. And then if you want to engage with me on social media, I am begrudgingly still an Instagram person, and you can find me @MeganAuman there.
Kurt Elster: I will include all of these in the show notes. Megan, thank you for doing this. It has been fabulous.
Megan Auman: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.