Ep 26: 8 Business Lessons I Learned in 2025

2025 changed everything for my business.

Revenue more than doubled. My audience exploded. My team expanded. And honestly? I grew more this year as a CEO and leader than any year before.

In this episode, I’m breaking down the 8 biggest business lessons I learned in 2025 — the real ones. Not the fluffy, recycled advice. The lessons I had to learn the hard way so you don’t have to.

We’re talking about:

• Why investing more (time and money) actually speeds up growth
• How systems create freedom — not restriction
• Why you can’t outsource leadership (especially with ads)
• How I build trust fast with brand-new audiences
• Why simplicity scales better than complexity
• The real bottleneck holding most businesses back (hint: it’s not strategy)
• Why support and skill-building aren’t optional if you want to grow
• And how to become the leader your business needs next, not just right now

This is a behind-the-scenes look at what actually worked in my business this year — ads, team, systems, energy, and decision-making — with specific examples from my launches, client work, and day-to-day CEO life.

If you’re a local business owner, a marketer, or someone who knows they’re capable of more growth than they’re seeing right now, this one will hit.

Ready to go deeper?

👉 Sign up for the Local Ad Strategy Session:
You’ll learn the exact systems and strategies my most successful clients use — and how to apply them to your own business (or your clients’ businesses).

🔗 https://www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local-ads

Or head to my Instagram and comment the word “STRATEGY” on any post and my bot will get you registered.

We’ll also dive deeper into Hometown Advantage, my 4-month local ads coaching program, inside the session.

See you in the next episode 💚

Transcript

0:00

Hello. Hello. Welcome or welcome back to the Hometown Advantage Podcast. My name's Nicole. If you don't already know me. I talk about all things, local ads mainly, but also a lot of behind the scenes, business, entrepreneur, life, scaling, motherhood, all of that fun stuff, and I thought it would be fun. To do a little breakdown on the biggest business lessons I learned this year in 2025. My business exploded this year. I worked with more business owners times 10 than I have in previous years. My revenue was up over a hundred percent. I have grown so much as a person, as a leader, as a CEO, and I just wanted to take a minute to look back for my own self and then bring you along deep dive on some of these lessons here so that maybe you can fast track. Pass the lessons that I had to learn the hard way. So I think I have eight for you. We're just gonna dive right into them. My number one lesson, the first thing that came to mind when I started brainstorming this is the more you invest, the faster you'll grow. Now, I preach using low cost ad strategies to maximize visibility for local businesses especially, but I will not sugarcoat this. The more you invest, the faster you grow. Now, this doesn't have to be just money, right? There's another currency we can use to grow our business, which is time. So at the very beginning of my business, yes, I did invest some money because I do believe it takes money to make money, but I mostly invested my time. I was working as a teacher. I had a 1-year-old, and I would get up. Early as heck, put in time, hours before work and then stay up late and put in time hours after work. I was able to get to a point where I was making the same amount that I was making in my teaching career. So that is when I quit and I was able to put so much more time into the business, which was so helpful. But now I invest both. I still spend a lot of time working on my business. And the truth is, I invest a lot of money relative to my income back into my ads. Of course, a lot of money is relative for a lot of people. So I'm gonna talk details on this. For me, visibility and audience growth means business growth. It has proven itself year after year, and this year especially. My follower account, my email list has grown exponentially. Actually, I just did a thread on this because at the beginning of the year, people were posting their audience numbers and they're like, I can't wait to post this. At the end of the year, I haven't seen other people posting it. Of course, I haven't been spending a ton of time on threads, but let me break this down. My Instagram followers on January 1st, 2025 was 1,413. When I made this post, it was 3,917. It's already past 4,000 right now. My email list had 661 people on it. When I made this post, it had 4,489 people. The amount that those two things have grown has been congruent with the amount my revenue has grown. I have grown those at that rate using ads. I see ads as my own version of the stock market, just with better and faster returns. The stock market returns like 10% average year over year, if I am remembering correctly, whereas my business revenue increased by over a hundred percent, right? Thanks ads. So what I do is I do big launches or promotions a couple times a year to do a big push into my business, and that's where I spend the bulk of my ad spend. So I launched four times this year. The first time I launched, I spent around a thousand dollars. The next time I bumped it way up to$7,000, and then 10 and then 12. What happened was I was able to see real life math happening in front of me where every time I launched, if I put a dollar in, I would get four to five out, which means if I put a thousand in, I would get four to 5,000 out. I actually made a lot higher return on that launch for various reasons. And every time I spend more, the number stays about the same. So it feels like my own personal A TMI can put in as much as I want and get four to five x out every time. I've also invested a ton of my returns from those launches and overall revenue into team. I have a virtual assistant who's like my right hand behind the scenes. I have an OBM, which is an online business manager. Who has helped me systematize and is going to be helping me way more in 2026 with the day-to-day management of the business. And then I have junior ad managers for my done for you services. And starting this month, I'm actually gonna have a co-coach inside my program. So I have always been the only one to give coaching. But I have a brilliant ads manager who's worked with me for over a year, knows my processes and my frameworks inside and out. Does an amazing job of creating ads, writing copy, coming up with ad strategy. She is coming in to help me with some of the aspects of the program, like giving feedback on ad campaigns and things like that, and I'm so excited for that support. And for my clients to be able to experience her genius because I just know that adding people to my program and adding experts only helps them. Doing this is freeing up my time to focus more on my favorite and the most important parts of my business, which are my ads, my ad strategy content, and then coaching for my clients, high level coaching that I can really spend a lot of time on because I have people running things in the background and helping me grow the business. Lesson number two, systems are life systems are freedom, not restriction. So I wouldn't say I was a systems hater in the past. I am just one of those people where I changed my mind so much. Or actually what happens is I learn so much so fast that I hate the idea of documenting something or coming up with this whole system and then having to change it all days later. So I would avoid them like the plague. And I would be that person and have that mindset that was like, it's just easier for me to just do what's in my head than to explain it to someone else or come up with a system for it. And that was until I hired my online business manager. Her name's Jill, and she has whipped me into shape. Let me tell you. It has been the absolute best thing ever, not only for my business, but for my life, because slowly but surely she started forcing me to use systems and the amount I've been able to get off my plate because of it. It's insane. At the beginning of this year, I actually took a break from taking done for you clients while I was working on perfecting everything for Hometown Advantage. And as I was perfecting it, it kept growing and having new needs. We needed new automation, set up, new ways to support clients so that they can get their absolute best results possible. And so it felt like this cycle where I would get caught up. And the need to revamp things then get caught up in the need to revamp things, and it was feeling like bringing back done for you services, which was always part of the plan was feeling farther and farther away. I honestly was scared to add it back in because. If you know my story, you know that the program came into play. One because I saw a huge need for local advertising education out there, but also because I felt myself driving towards burnout. I wasn't there yet'cause I wasn't in it long enough. I realized it before I got there. Working with so many clients at one time. Completely on my own. I think the most I got up to was nine or 10 at a time, completely managing their entire ad strategy, their day to day reporting everything completely on my own, and it was way too much. But I knew they could be a huge recurring revenue source for the business. And that was part of my goal with hiring Jill too, so I brought her on. We have perfected the systems for Hometown Advantage down to the nitty gritty with a fine tooth comb, and we've been able to add VAC done for you services a couple months ago, and I still feel so good about my workload. I track my work hours. Down to the minute so that I can audit my time and know where I'm spending the most time, know where I can continue to outsource things so that I can free up more time for those things I mentioned before about what I love and what actually drives the business forward. And I work about 30 hours a week right now. Sometimes less, but most of all, I don't feel stressed out about the workload. That's the big thing. I feel like this is what happens with so many small business owners when it comes to content and ads too. Content feels hard for so many people because they don't have a system. Every time they go to post, they're starting from scratch, staring at a blank blinking cursor. And then they're kicking themselves when they figure out why they can't stay consistent, quote unquote, and it's just because the system they've created for themselves, which is basically no system at all, is not set up for you to win. You have to systematize the tasks and the things you want to do in your life. In order for things to simply fall into place. So if you see other people who it looks like things just simply fall into place, they can probably think a system. So funny. Over the break, I posted an Instagram story where I had a basket of batteries and the little screwdriver that you need for all the kids' toys to put the batteries in scissors and like my coffee and stuff. And I said. This is how I'm tackling December 26th. I told my kids, I will open anything for you. I will put batteries into anything for you. I will prep anything that you want as long as you bring it to me and I can sit here and read my book and drink my coffee. In between my OBM saw that and she responded. It's almost like you've systematized your life or systematized your day. I'm like, that's exactly what I did. Because I am learning. I am a changed woman when it comes to systems. Let me tell you. Okay, let's move on to number three. You can't outsource your leadership, whether it's with your ads, your content, your offers, your systems. They work best when you take ownership of the direction as the CEO. As the owner, delegation only works when the vision and the strategy is so clear. So honestly, we had a slower start with my OBM. I'm gonna keep bringing it back to this because this is my first huge hire in my business. I have a lot of stories actually about a lot of VAs that I've hired and struggles I had with them, and it all came back to the fact that I didn't have my own strategy or systems in place by the time I hired them. But we had a slower start because I really thought I could just offload everything to her. And I quickly learned that's not the case. I'm still the one with the vision for my business. I'm still the one that knows my clients best. I'm still the one that knows what works best here and there. So I realized when it comes to creating systems that I need, I have to lead the charge, get her started, and then she can take it from there. Okay, so I see this all the time with local small business owners. They'll come to me and they'll say, I hired an agency. It cost me thousands of dollars, and it was a huge waste. They were terrible when I ask the business owner, what were your results like? I don't know. Else I know is I didn't get any clients. Okay? Ads give you so much data. If they don't give you clients, they still give you so much data. You should know what was happening in your account. You should know why things weren't working. If you didn't know yourself, you should have been asking, you should have understood the strategy to start, and if you didn't understand based on what they're telling you, you have to ask more questions. You have to be the leader. You have to be the top person in charge of your own business. You can't. Outsource that. Unless you're a multimillion dollar company that's hiring a CEO, that's hiring a director of marketing. If that's not you, then you are the leader. All of this is on you. There's no getting around it. Unfortunately, you can't outsource your leadership. That's why I think it's so important that small business owners learn advertising. And I don't mean it in a way that you have to do it yourself forever. I actually highly encourage hiring it out. Once you understand the basics, you will waste so much money outsourcing that leadership to other experts who don't understand your business the way you do. And here's the thing, it's not always like that. But it is most of the time actually, I work with clients and I, my team and I completely run their ads. Two of the clients that just signed are people who went through my program. Almost every other client I've worked with ran ads on their own before coming to me. And they came to me because they had traction. They saw results, they wanted better results, and they also wanted to free up their time to focus on the parts that they really thrive at. Lesson number four, you can build trust fast if you show up in the right way. So everyone's talking about how we're in this trust recession right now when it comes to selling and marketing online, it's for obvious reasons, right? One, people have been burned by buying something from a social media ad or a social media post in the past to ai, not knowing what's a real human and what's not. But the thing is that actually most of the people who bought my programs, especially during launches, are people who had just heard about me weeks before or days before from my launch ads. So a huge problem that a lot of my peers in the online space are facing is that it's taking a really long time for someone to convert into a sale. They'll become a lead. They will show interest, whether they sign up for an email list. They follow them, they reach out, what have you, but then for that person or any of those people to then buy something, it's taking a really long time. That's actually not happening for me. I'm actually having a bit of the opposite issue where people who've been on my list for a while aren't converting. I'm having more new people convert, so I'm gonna talk about more about that. I don't know if it's in this episode, to be honest. I scripted out five episodes in the past couple hours. So my brain might have a few of them. Mushed together here. So these are ways that I've been able to do that. One, I show up face to camera in my content and in other ways, like on my live launch events. So whether that's face to camera, videos, content like this. Simply photos of me, and not even just professional, like brand photos, but like behind the scenes photos, me and my kids, me out at a restaurant or me a real person is here, right? The second way is that I share real opinions, thoughts, takes, and experiences. I'm not regurgitating chat. GPT, garbage Man. I'm getting fired up on this episode. Bear with me here. So many people are putting ads out there that. Are like ready to unleash your best self. This isn't a course, it's a full lifestyle system or something ridiculous like that chat, GPT writes, it sounds exactly the same every time. It's not clear and it's silly. It's just silly. Okay. We don't do that. Here I am sharing what's actually happening with my ads, with my clients', ads, wins, losses, all of the things. And then lastly, it's just down to being a human coming to your audience and your clients with a true heart for service in helping. This seems obvious. It is answering questions that you've answered thousands of times before. It's understanding that people buying from you are human too. They're not robots who reach out, have a question, and then instantly buy. That's something that a lot of my clients say is, I'm so sick of the Messenger ads that you teach, because people will message me and then I'll never hear from them again. First of all, I have a. Episode coming on, how to get more conversions from your ads. But second of all, yes, why? That's not how it works. People message you and then instantly you've got a sale notification or a lead notification. The fact that they're messaging you at all is huge. All right, let's move on to number five. Simplicity scales. Every time I've simplified, things have moved faster. Sales, delivery, team alignment, all of the things I see so many people overcomplicating things. They overcomplicate their offers or lack of offers. They think they don't want to create an offer because they don't wanna do discounts or what have you, when that's not actually what an offer is. An offer is simply telling somebody, I can do this for you. This is the price, or this is what you'll get out of it. So people wanna get complicated with it and be like if they buy this package, then they can get this thing and then they can get a couple dollars off and then they can come back and get this and this percentage off and no, that's too complicated. Make it simple. I'll do this for you. You do this for me. That's an offer. They overcomplicate ad spend or scaling their ads. They're like, I don't know how much to spend. Spend something, spend anything. I don't care either. And then if your ads are doing good, based on what you do decide to spend, scale it. Scale it up. Keep spending. If you want to keep growing and keep making more, they overcomplicate ad creation. They have something they're really good at that they can sell, whether that's Pilates classes, dog training, a delicious meal at a restaurant, and then they're like, I don't know how to show people. This is amazing. How about photos of the food? How about literally a photo of you? At the front of the Pilates class, instructing literally a static photo sometimes does better than anything else because it doesn't look like an ad. It just looks like a casual post that people are already showing up on Facebook or Instagram to see they're overcomplicating their lead quality. Did you know. I pay for thousands and thousands of leads just for tens, if that's the right term to buy from me. So my. Average conversion rate for my launches is in between two and 3%, and that's what brings me four to five, sometimes six or beyond X return on ad spend. So I am fine with that. Would I love for it to be higher, of course, or working on it, but I'll get so many people that will get 10 leads and then say I haven't heard back from any of them. Or I heard back from some, and one said they can't afford it. So I feel like my leads, my ads aren't going to the right people. Listen, you need more volume and not everyone's gonna be a winner. Okay. That was going off on a little bit of a tangent. Let's go on to lesson number six. Energy is your real bottleneck to growth. It's actually not time. It's not ideas. It's not a lack of knowledge. It's energy because when you protect your energy, all of those other things improve. You get more time, you get more ideas, you get more knowledge, you have more energy. Energy begets energy. Oh my gosh, that reminds me of when my. Babies were babies and it was always sleep. Be get sleep. If you can get them to sleep, they'll sleep more. I'm like, I can't get them to sleep. Sorry, tangent. So here's three ways I protect and bottle up my energy so that I can use it endlessly as needed. One sleep. This one's so hard, I just, maybe that's where the sleep thing came from. I saw it lower down on my notes. I just bought an aura ring. It's a very expensive ring. You can use your health savings account if you have one of those, but it tracks your sleep. It tracks your steps, it tracks your workout, it tracks my cycle, things like that, my temperature. And so I have a huge goal that I get at least seven hours of sleep every night. I would love eight, but it's like practically impossible. It feels like when I sleep well, I feel like I can take on the world. Of course there's very specific things I can do about that. I have an episode coming on my 2026 goals, and one of them is to replace scrolling with reading. That's also going to help my sleep. It's gonna help break my scrolling addiction and it's gonna help my sleep. Two things that I really need to help with that I need to focus on working out. And meditating both before work. So I'm a huge fan of Dan Martel. He is an entrepreneur, influencer, business coach, and he has a saying that he posts on his stories every day, exhaust the body to tame the mind. I tell myself that and it works. And then meditating is something new. I've started just in the past two months or so. As challenged by one of my business coaches, she asked me, when do you have stillness in your day to just be with your thoughts or honestly to just not think at all? I said, never. She said, you need that. You will grow faster. You will be more clear, you will have more energy if you do that. So literally seven minutes. I use an app called the Insight Timer. I either find a guided one or I just set the timer for seven minutes. I sit on my bed in a comfy position. I either listen to what they have to say or I sit with calming music and I try not to think. And it helps. It does help. I go into my day so much clearer. I have to do it before I start work or I will not do it at all because it actually takes a lot of energy and focus for me to do that. So if I try and do it after I start work, my brain's not gonna turn off. But I highly recommend trying it. If you wanna be accountable buddies with meditating, let me know. We can do it in the dms. We can send each other photos and check-ins like, Hey, did you meditate tonight? And then the last thing is, of course, just rest in time away. I didn't plan enough for this year, so that's a big change I'm making booking travel way in advance and time off, way in advance, putting it in the calendar, et cetera. Whenever I do these things or have this rest in time away, it's like my energy completely replenishes. It's like a full recharge. I'm doing it. A lot this year'cause I need that recharge as much as possible to come back and have these bursts of energy. Lesson number seven, investing in support and learning new skills isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. So childcare team help. Mentors, coaches, those aren't luxuries to me. I have to have them and it to get where I want to go, and I had to have them to get where I've gotten. You have to put in the time, even when it feels hard, and you have to spend the money to make the money that you want, you have to look to people who've gone before you or who have expertises outside of your own to learn from. Completely DIYing it and learning on your own will just simply take too long. I don't have time for that. And last lesson, you've got to become the leader your business needs next, not just right now. That's why I made a big scary decision to actually bring my OBM. As a full partner in my business, she's going to be the full time manager of my business, which is a$3,000 a month investment, which is the biggest investment I've ever made in my business outside of advertising, of course. Because even though where my revenue is right now, that feels a little bit tight. Also based on the amount of money I wanna take home and all of those things. But where I want to go, that investment is nothing. So I'm sacrificing. I'm investing so that I can get there faster. It's why I am spending on ads like crazy. It is why I just invested in a YouTube program because I'm going to add that as a traffic and sales generator on top of ads. It's why I have business coaches and peers in my space. It's why I focus on systems. It's why I do all the things I just talked about in this episode. Every day, I'm becoming the leader. My business needs to reach those big, crazy goals. You're gonna have into the next episode to hear what those are. I'm dropping my revenue goal there because I don't have time to, all that was so fun. Those were the eight biggest lessons I learned in my businesses here. If you are not signed up for the local ed strategy session, what are you doing? Whether you own a local business or you support local businesses with their marketing, you wanna learn ads or you already do ads, but you wanna learn how to do'em better, you should be there. I'm gonna talk about my most successful clients, the exact systems and strategy that they use, and how you can implement it for your business or your clients' businesses. And I'm gonna talk more about my program, hometown Advantage. Hometown Advantage is a local ads coaching program. It's four months long. You get lifetime access to the full course. And honestly, the course is all you actually need to see success with your ads. But it, the program comes with so much more than that. It comes with weekly group coaching calls with me. It comes with unlimited ad campaign reviews and ad data review. So anytime you wanna run an ad, you can submit it for review and get our exact feedback, a loom video, talking about what will work well and what we would change to make them convert better. Along with add data reviews. So every seven days of your add data, you can submit your data to me and I will tell you, is this good? Is this bad? What should we do next? Based on the data that you have. So far on your ads also comes with our private Slack channel where you can ask questions anytime, any day, get a response within 24 hours from me or one of my co-coach. And some really fun bonuses happening in January. So one is that you get four months complimentary access to the local content club, where you get 10 post prompts, fill in the blank captions, templates, and examples on what to post every month that you can then repurpose into your ads. You get$500 off. So that's a big one. And then what I'm so excited about is that I'm hosting for all Hometown Advantage members. The February launch, your ads Sprint. So we're gonna get on Zoom three days. There will be recordings if you can't make it live. But we're going to write your ads, create your ads, and launch them in Ads Manager in three days so that you can get things up and running quickly. All together, step by step on Zoom. Okay, so if you're not signed up for the strategy session, there is a link in the description. You can go to my page and comment the word strategy on any post, and my bot will get you signed up. Or you can simply go to www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local ads. See you on the next one.