#95 - Simplify to Sell: The Mindset Shift That Grew My Sales by 60%

There comes a moment in every solopreneur journey when you have to pause and ask: Is this effort actually aligned with what I set out to create? Or am I just doing what I “should,” chasing every shiny tactic, and exhausting myself in the process?

In this short but powerful mindset episode, I share the personal story behind how I simplified my business while caregiving for my mother, let go of misaligned strategies, and made space for more income, impact, and clarity. 

You’ll hear how I:

• Deleted 350+ email subscribers in a bold list cleanse
• Focused on just one offer for 6 months (and saw a 60% increase in sales)
• Developed a quantum leap mindset shift that changed everything

✨ Plus: I invite you to my free class Strategy & Soul: Align Your 6-Figure Systems
✨ And share how to join my private 30-Day Sprint for end-of-year momentum

If you’ve been feeling pulled in a million directions, this is your call back to clarity, courage, and focus. Because you’re closer than you think.

📩 Inquire about the 30-Day Coaching Sprint via DM on Instagram @deborah_smith_coaching or email hello@deborahcsmith.com

Mindset to Market is a Luminous Creative Production. If you'd like to learn more about our business coaching program and group coaching container, please visit us online at DeborahcSmith.com.

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Mindset to Market is produced by Deborah C. Smith and designed to inspire and support big-hearted creatives in finding their own unique path, building a sustainable business, and creating financial, spiritual, mental wellness and abundance.

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Transcript

 There comes a moment in every solopreneur journey where you have to ask yourself, is all of this effort that I'm putting in actually aligned with what I said I wanted when I got started? Or am I just checking boxes? Am I doing what I see other successful entrepreneurs doing and just keeping myself busy all the time?

We need to take a step back every once in a while and check in with the larger effort that we're putting in and make sure that it's actually aligned. And if you've been feeling like you're running to catch the bus within your business, or like the constant cycle of chaos and disturbing world news is making it really difficult to focus and take clear action inside your business.

And I want you to listen up because I'm coming in hot today with the mindset shift that helped me create more income, more impact, and more space in my own personal life and in my business. This will change the way that you think about how you're gonna move inside your business and. Because you're always closer than you think you are, right?

You're always almost right there, and it's important that we realize that we're closer than we think. So let's get into some quantum leap energy. Let's make some informed decisions, some data-driven decisions, and let's hit some of those goals that you've been working so hard for. Hey there. Welcome to the Mindset To Market Podcast, your go-to place for practical tools and solutions for the everyday challenges of being a creative and spiritual solopreneur living in a material world.

I'm your host. Deborah Smith. I'm a holistic business coach with 17 years of experience, and I help my clients bust through mindset blocks and build a daily practice that prioritizes your business's financial growth as well as your personal health and wellness. I'm here to offer you support, creativity, mindset, practical how-tos, and getting into imperfect messy actions so you can find balance while building the dream.

Business. If you're a purpose-driven solepreneur, who's working on that dream one day at a time, then you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Welcome back, friend. Thank you for being here with me. It's Debra, your gentle, but direct voice of reason when the marketing chaos kicks in. And today's episode is short but powerful.

It's a mindset reset. And I am super excited to be recording today's episode on Election Day in New York City. We just had Hollow Weekend followed by the New York City Marathon, which runs directly in front of my apartment. So needless to say, I'm just a bit energized by the buzz of all the people and the movement.

And that's why I am recording this particular episode for you today, um, as opposed to another topic because listen, this time of year can feel either very frenzied or like just a lot of unfinished ideas and end of year panic or. It can be a portal into deep clarity, deep creativity, and that can translate into cash.

And so, you know, energy moves when we choose to move it, right? Because the hilarious saying is, shift happens and it does. And so I was just witnessing all of these runners and witnessing all of these people in costume and just all of this transformative. Transformational energy down here in the city, and it really got me thinking about how we have control of our own energy at all times.

We control the shift, and so I want you to choose clarity, creativity, and cash over all the chaos. And that's what today's mindset shift episode is about. So here's the shift. If you have been feeling like it's too late to make this year count, I need you to hear me say you don't need to do more things.

To get more done. You don't need to do more things to make more money or to make a bigger impact you, you need to actually simplify and align your actions towards one unified goal. You don't need a million new offers. You don't need a new funnel. You don't need a five day challenge whipped up overnight.

You don't need a Black Friday sale. You don't need to run to catch the bus. What you need to do is drop out of all of that chaotic thinking and focus in on one clear objective. If you have a clear channel for your magic to flow through a clear aligned pathway, things begin to flow and your audience can feel that and they will step in and say yes to you.

So we're gonna strip away all the obstacles for a minute and pull back the curtain like I was saying, and look at the core purpose of why you started your business in the first place. Revisit that place we are in. Two month mark before the end of 2025. We still have two full months. Think about this. If it was January, it would seem like a million years until the end of February.

Two months would feel like a really expansive amount of time, but because it's the end of the year, we feel like we're running out of time. It's just mindset. It's just a shift in perspective. So it's the same amount of time, it's the same two months you had on January 1st when you were full of excited ideas.

Two full months, right? And yes, I know the holidays are coming, but guess what? That's fine. What we're gonna do today is talk a little bit about stripping away all the many things and focusing in on one or two truly impactful activities inside your business. Okay, so we're gonna claim that clarity, and I am going to keep it real with you this often and almost always starts by letting go.

So we've gotta let go of the things that are not the needle, moving to activities, not the impact driven activities. Not actually working for us. And even sometimes that's really painful to do because it's like a great idea that you had, that you were so all in on. But if it's not getting you to the original goal you set and the intention you set for your business, if it's not helping you connect with the right people and help serve them, if it's not helping you sell offers and make money, then we need to honestly look at that and probably let go.

So I'm gonna pull back the curtain here for just a minute and share a personal story. Something that you may or may not know is that, um, I am frequently pulled in the direction of being a caretaker. I did an entire episode on this. Um, I will drop a link to it in the show notes. It's really challenging to be.

In a caretaker role, whether you're a mom or you have a sick parent like I do. My mom is 83. She lives in an adult nursing home with a neurodegenerative illness, and she's nonverbal, so, but she's alive, she's present, she knows what's going on, and she's still navigating life with this disability. So for a long time I allowed that to create so much stress in my life.

Um, any of my peers that listened to this episode or who, anybody who was in a coaching container with me at the time may remember, um, the emotional load of this, the logistics, the broken healthcare system, just, it was actual, it was running me into the ground, the unpredictability, right? The never knowing when I was gonna get a phone call from a nurse or an insurance company.

And one day I had this realization that if I wanted to keep showing up for her and give her the best of my care and give her the best of my love while she's alive, I had no choice but to create a business that also supported me. Now, I've always run what I call a holistic business, which means I prioritize wellness as a core value inside my business, which means I pour into myself at the beginning of the day so that I can pour into others all day long.

However, the caretaker role really is like a whammy. It's like really hard. You, you don't know when it's coming. You don't know when they're gonna need you. It's, I imagine it's like parenting. I'm not a parent, so for all my moms out there, I see you. I'm very close with my, my older sister who is a, a single mom of two kids.

And so I see the trials and tribulations of being a mom. So I think it's very, very different. I don't think it's the same at all, but I think it's got a similar. Tax on you, which is that when they need you, they need you. And if you're committed, you drop everything else for that person or people. So it's, it's, it's hard to run a business and be a caretaker.

So again, I had this crystal clear moment where I thought, you know what, if this is gonna work for me, if I'm gonna. Continue to run my business. I've gotta figure out something different. I've gotta stop following complex strategies that are working for the gurus, and I've gotta start ruthlessly simplifying everything inside my business because the truth was that I no longer had hours to waste.

Just figuring things out like spaghetti against the wall was gone for me. I needed my coaching business to work and not just work. The general idea of it, but work in today's very challenging marketplace, right? Things have changed, right? We have ai, we have all kinds of other things happening, and so, and I had limited time and energy, so I had what I now call a quantum leap mindset shift, and really this was forged and fire for me.

At that moment. I realized that we can collapse time. We can stop spinning, we can focus in on one or two high impact tasks that will be enough to move the needle inside of our businesses. And when I say move the needle, I mean make money, right? Create aligned communication. Get crystal clear about the the exact person who we are here to help.

And yes, you can expand and change and shift and do all the other things eventually, but if you're not profitable inside your business. We need to simplify what you're doing and focus in on one or two things. And that mindset and the systems that I built around it really changed everything for me. And so I'm gonna share a little bit about that today to try to help you get there.

So I wanna give you a couple of examples of how I executed on this, right? These are exactly the things that I did. So last year, at the beginning of the year, so now this is the beginning of 2024. I decided that I was gonna go all in on one single offer that would focus on helping one single type of client get one single result.

Now, I already knew. And had laid the groundwork for my current coaching container. I had the course built mindset to market foundations and understood that those six modules were the foundation of building a successful online business, but it felt too heavy of a lift to try and sell that. From where I was from the point that I was at.

So I decided to focus in on one step that a woman solopreneur could take, right? So I niched it down to women solopreneurs, not, you know, giant agencies, not everybody, and their brother, and. I focused in on one specific thing, which is creating an asset that you can sell. So this could be a digital asset, like a course or a, you know, it could be a, a audience building asset, like a podcast.

And that became my summer camp container, which led to. People joining my Foundations program. Right? But I, I wasn't selling foundations, I was just focused on one thing, creating a digital asset that would help you grow and sell your personal business offers. Then the people from that summer camp program spilled over into the mindset to market Foundations course easily, because it was the obvious next step.

But I focused in just on that one single offer, so I did nothing but sell that one offer for six months. No new freebies, no launch rollercoaster, no shiny distractions. It was just this one offer, this digital asset creation course and program. You could sign up, I would help you choose the project to focus on for you.

And that was it. And I focused all of my energy on messaging on that one offer. And guess what? I had a 60% increase in sales because I wasn't selling anything else. And Clarity Convert. Right. When your audience knows exactly what you do and exactly how you can help them, and exactly how they can buy from you, they do.

The right people will find you. There's a million people out there who need what you have, but they don't know that you are the expert in that one thing. Now, if you want a checklist for this type of clarity and focus, you can go back to episode 92 where I gave you a Q4 game plan. And of course, I think the very first thing in that list of things to do is.

Pick one thing. So if you haven't listened to that yet, go queue that up. Go back to episode 92 and listen to your Q4 game plan. It's still relevant. You can still help you in these last two months. Um, another quick example is that over the summer, this past summer here in 2025, um, I did a huge list cleanse.

I deleted over 350 names from my email list, just poof gone. And I called it a list cleanse, but it was so much more than that because the truth is. A lot of the people who had signed up during that time when I was really scattered and all over the place with my messaging. They were not aligned with my current offers and my current messaging.

My energy was confused, my messaging was all over the place, and I had freebies all I was trying all kinds of things. And so when I looked at my list and looked at the people on the list, I realized I was not connected to them. How could they possibly be connected to me? Some of them, you know, grabbed a day planner and some of them came to a training and some of them, you know, there's just.

It was just misaligned and was it hard to cut 350 people off of my email list? Sure. They didn't know me though as the woman and the coach that I am today who has clarified and honed in on the person that I wanna serve. So I, I ran a very short campaign. Um, I think I'll do an episode on how to do this because it's actually a little bit technically annoying and complicated.

But the point is, after two or three emails, they had a chance to click a link and stay on my list. And if they didn't click that link, they were gone. And I'm sorry to anyone listening who got cut, but if you wanna get back on, you would only do so if you actually wanna get my emails. And so now I feel so much lighter.

My open rates skyrocketed. Right? Um, but much more importantly, I feel in alignment, again with the people that I'm speaking to, because I write all those emails for a person to get a transformation and to get information and to get, you know, tips. And if it's a giant batch of misaligned people, it's hard to write the emails.

Like every now, every week when I write my emails, I know exactly who I'm talking to. 'cause I know the people on that list. Are came here for that information. And so it's just to remind you that sometimes we hold on to old ideas, old offers, old messaging, and even old subscribers because we think that we should, okay, but letting go is a strategy.

I'm gonna say that again. Letting go of the things that are holding you back, of the people that are no longer aligned of the messaging that no longer sells your offer. That is a strategy. So if you have not thought this through very clearly yet, just take five minutes today and think of one or two things you, you you're doing that you can let go of, because that's gonna clear space for the right people to come in, the aligned clients, they're waiting for you to clear up the pathway.

So here is the real question. What are you holding onto that is keeping you from focus, flow, and revenue right now? Is it an old offer that no longer lights you up, but you worked so hard on it, so you feel like you have to keep it open? I mean, trust me when I tell you I have that, that story, I just, I built so many courses and so many offers and so many trainings.

I, I was a prolific producer in 2020 and 2021 was trying all the things and I have so much like just. Stuff floating out there on the internet that no longer is aligned. Um, so I have to let that go. I had to, is it a launch plan that you made out of fear? Right? You're supposed to do launches like this, you're supposed to have this big elaborate launch.

Uh, is it an audience that doesn't know the version of you that you have evolved into? I, I offer you this opportunity to just let it go. We are not finishing this year in Scattered Energy. We are finishing clear. We are finishing purposeful and that will lead to finishing profitable. So if you need a realignment right now, and not just a mindset shift, but actual strategy to help you, I wanna personally invite you to a free class that I'm teaching.

It's actually tonight, so if you have to be listening to this in real time, but you can always also get the replay if you're listening to this. In the future at any point in time, um, I'm calling the class Strategy and Soul aligning your six figure systems. Cute name. But what really I'm gonna teach in this class is how to stop duct taping your business together.

And I'm gonna lay out six very clear steps that are the system that I have used over and over and over again with myself and with clients to support your vision. And this is one that feels really good. It feels, you know, aligned with the thing that you say you want to be doing. That how you wanna show up and serve.

It converts because it's aligned with what your audience wants, and it doesn't drain your soul. So strategy and soul, it matters. That's the kind of business that I want to run. That's how I help my clients focus to run their businesses. And you'll walk away knowing exactly what those six steps are and how to focus on building your next level.

So you can sign up right now. It's a Zoom link that is just a little, click the button and register on Zoom. I did not build a funnel for this because I'm just kind of doing this end of year style. Or you can DM me on Instagram, um, or anywhere you're seeing listening to this, and I will send you the link.

And if you are ready to start implementing steps and you want support, right? I do have a, an offer right now that is a 30 day sprint container. It's open. I've only got a couple of spots for this. It's a private group sprint where we're gonna get laser focused, take very messy action, but actually make sales and set up your business for this type of growth that's going to not only help you.

Feel like you got a win at the end of this year, but set you up for heading out into next year 2026, feeling really excited, having some excited momentum, and so DM me on that. If you're interested in the 30 day sprint, there's, like I said, there's only a few spots for that because I just have limited capacity, but I'm excited about this.

It was actually brought to me as a suggestion by one, not one, but two of my clients who reached out and said, I just need a little focus at the end of the year. Can we do something short, like a 30 day sprint? So we, the answer is yes, we can. Uh, so I just wanna remind you the whole point of this episode is that you don't need to hustle more.

What you need to do is cut the noise out of your life and get into alignment with one or two. Big movement actions in your life. So choosing one offer that is going to actually help your client that you serve, and just focusing in on that for the end of the year, for your messaging, for your content, for the outreach that you do at networking groups.

Anytime you're talking about your business, that's the one thing that you do. And clarity on how many spots you have. Clarity on exactly how much it's gonna cost. Don't worry about the big, you know. Sales that are coming down the pipeline around Thanksgiving. I mean, use that to your advantage if you want to, and feel free to run a little Black Friday sale or a holiday themed sale or pre-sell for the new year.

That's a great strategy, which is just to say, I've got three spots open in the new year. You can get 'em now to discount a rate, but keep it focused on one offer, one way that you can serve one client archetype that you can help, and just one price point. Just keep it simple. Right, because we need to be courageous here and release what's no longer serving us and cut the noise out at this point in the year, and trust that your next level already exists within you.

That quantum leap mindset shift is here for you. The year isn't over. The race isn't over. Oh my God. Talk about inspiration. The people running the New York City Marathon blew my mind. Year after year, I come to see the New York City Marathon because the runners are so inspiring. They don't give up. They keep running till they get to 26.2 miles if they have to walk, if they have to crawl, and the whole city comes out to cheer them on, and it is so exciting.

And it just inspired me so much to see these, these humans out there giving it their all. It made me wanna focus and give it my all for the end of the year. So let's go get it, you guys. Let's go out there and connect with people and show them who we are and, and allow, you know, invite them into our offers and invite them to have a transformation and end the year feeling really strong.

And if you have, uh, an inspiring story about finishing strong or cutting the noise and getting into alignment, I would love to hear it. You can email me at. hello@debracsmith.com, H-E-L-L-O at D-E-B-O-R-A-H-C-S-M-I-T-H. And I will also put the link for tonight's class free classes at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.

If you're listening to this in real time and you wanna come join me tonight, please do. You can hop in there, it's free. Um, I am not, this is not a big sales webinar. I will, I'm telling you right now what I'm selling, which is I have a 30 day sprint and of course I have spots open and foundations, but this class tonight is really about just a service to my community.

It's about getting in alignment and following some very simple steps. And, you know, a win for you guys is a win for me. That's why I do this. So love to see you there and if you just wanna watch the replay of that and you can't make it tonight, no problem, just hit me up. I will send you the replay. I record everything I do.

And yeah, I'm, I'm just excited about, you know, this time of year I just love November and fall in, you know, in New England area, particularly in New York City. So I'm excited and I am looking forward to seeing what you create and how you shift into clarity, focus, alignment, and start connecting with people and making some sales at the end of the year.

And again, if you want help. Jump into the 30 day sprint container. Just DM me and I will give you all the details. Uh, and we are, we are doing amazing work inside foundations right now. My, my, my, the members of that coaching group are really getting ready to crush it in 2026. So there's a few spots open in there as well.

So with all of that said, I'm so grateful to be here, to be of service. I hope you have an amazing day today. Get out and vote if you are in, uh, anywhere in the country of United States. Get out there and vote and have an amazing day, and I'll see you in the next coming episode. And until then, may you be vibrant.