15 Brutal Reasons Candle Businesses Fail (And How To Avoid Them)

We walk through the 15 real reasons candle businesses stall and how to fix them with clear actions. From niche and numbers to branding, email, and mindset, the aim is a repeatable plan that turns great candles into steady sales.

• defining a niche you belong to and customer research
• building systems for batching, production, budgeting, inventory
• tracking analytics to spot trends and pivot
• realistic effort in a saturated market
• collecting emails and using content pillars
• seeking education, mentorship, and SEO basics
• cohesive branding beyond a logo
• showing your face and story to build trust
• avoiding trend chasing with a core line
• switching from hobby effort to business habits
• launching before perfection and iterating
• diversifying channels beyond social posts
• testing markets and getting trusted feedback

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Transcript

Why Candle Businesses Fail

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Today, we're getting into the real reason why candle businesses fail. Not the dramatic Facebook group stuff, but the patterns that I'm seeing over and over again as I'm coaching makers and watching people trying to get their businesses off the ground. Now, my goal isn't to scare you here today. It's actually to help you to see the roadblocks early so that we can avoid them. So let's jump into the 15 biggest things that are holding candle businesses back and how you can stay away from them. All right, so the first theme that we're gonna talk about today is the foundation was never built. So a foundation for your candle business was never built. And what does that mean? Here are five key ways that businesses fail when they don't have a solid foundation. So the first one, it's going to be that they picked the wrong niche or they tried to serve everyone. So you want to pick a niche that you are comfortable building your brand around. So it's most likely going to be something that you already belong to. Are you a world traveler that wants to start a line of candles around uh traveling the world? If you are, if you are a world traveler, you're gonna do much better at creating that niche than I would. When I don't travel as often, maybe as a world traveler would, right? Or if you are making candles for stay-at-home moms that have kids running around like crazy, you're rushing all over town and you're just trying to make a candle in an environment for someone that can just have some peace of mind for 10 minutes a day, right? You might belong to that niche where I don't belong to that niche. Okay. Um, are you a sports fanatic and you want to build a line of candles around that niche? Pick a niche that you belong to. That's gonna save you the uncertainty because then you're gonna be able to answer this next question, which is they don't know who they're selling to. Once you have a niche, you have to know the ins and outs of who that customer would be. Okay, so you are a stay-at-home mom that has five kids and you have to drive them to school to practice all the after-school activities, you know a lot more about that person than say I would. That's not part of that niche. So pick a niche and then understand who that person is in and out. If you don't know the niche that you uh the customer of a niche that you want to get into, that's fine. You're just gonna do a lot of research. For instance, if I was going to do a metaphysical line of candles that are gonna have different zodiacs and different just metaphysical things involved with it. I don't understand that world necessarily. That doesn't mean I can't create a line of candles around it. It's just gonna take me a little bit more work. I'm gonna have to do the research, understand what are the likes, the not likes. You don't want to show up and create a niche and be basically an imposter in that, right? You have to know the ins and outs about a particular niche so that you can understand who to sell to. Now, number three is they never built systems like batching, budgeting, production planning, and inventory management. These are all key elements that any successful business has set up. You have to have a process for uh batching everything. Um, you have to be able to um have production planning because so many people will find that they run out of time. So, this is going to be part of your time management is getting batching and a production planning schedule together. You also have to know how to budget. And then, of course, inventory management. You can't run out of stuff. We can't run out of stuff that our customers want. Um, that is just a killer for any business. Your customers want to buy something and you don't have it. So we uh recommend uh Inventora. There's a different option out there in the world. There's a link usually in our show notes for inventory. It is an affiliate link, but that um link, it doesn't cost you anything else to use it. You can check them out. We kind of have a love hey with them, but it works really great for what we use it for. We've been using it from day one. Uh, we actually started on a free plan, and then just as we scaled, we just paid more and more based on the features that we need. But check out the free ones, check out the other ones on the market as well. But inventory is a really good inventory management. Total side note, but inventory management software is going to be like your raw supplies. How much wax do you have, how many vessels do you have, how many wicks, not made candles that we just tracked out right inside of Shopify. After we batch something, say an inventory, it automatically will send over to Shopify where we track, you know, our uh inventory levels of actual produced product. So knowing, making sure you don't run out of wax, oil, things like that, um, all your materials, that's what we use an inventory software for. Okay. Uh, number four is they don't review their numbers often. So nothing ever improves. You can go from say a thousand dollar month to a fifteen hundred dollar month to a three thousand dollar month to a five thousand, ten thousand, keep scaling, and you're saying, I'm doing fantastic. This is great, which very well could be the case. But often people won't say, How did I get there? How did I grow from a thousand to five thousand dollars? Oh, I don't know. I'm I'm posting on social media and I'm sending out some emails and I've been working on my website. You need to understand your numbers, you need to track your numbers and see what is actually causing those um increases or the reverse, causing those decreases. Once a month, I usually dive into my numbers and I say, okay, what's selling this year versus last year? What's selling this month versus last month? And I can see a big change, and then I can know where I need to pivot. For instance, last year, uh vanilla scents came, kind of came back kind of hot. There were all different types of vanilla scents within the perfume space. So it kind of carries over, trickles down actually into the candle space, and people are wanting vanilla candles. So we have our toasted vanilla candle, we have our velvet smoked vanilla candle. Looking at numbers uh for my fall collection, um, I was seeing that this year versus last year, our toasted vanilla candle was way, way down. Our sales as a whole was up, but our our sales of that specific candle was down dramatically. And so then I go into my Shopify and I find out, or I go into my um Google Analytics and I see what people are searching for to then go and buy that candle. And I realize, oh, people aren't even searching for that as much. So that's something, okay, what do I do? Do I need to go and find another hot candle that's you know, sent or search terms that people are looking for and build around that? So you got to have your numbers. You can't just say, oh, I'm I'm doing better than last year. So just continuing to do what I'm doing, or you're just gonna grow at a slow pace. If you can understand why your numbers are going up or down, if they're going down, you can pivot so that they stop going down. And if they're going up, you can then focus your energy into what's making you go up. If you're realizing that the majority of your sales are actually just coming from Facebook and Instagram, that they're they're clicking on your links on your posts and going to your website, then you know I need to post more. And then I need to just post more because if that's bringing 80% of my traffic, what if I double the amount of posts that I put out there? And then I'm not spending half of my time on these other avenues that I might be working on. So you gotta know, uh, you gotta know your numbers. You gotta know where they're coming from. And we talk about this often inside of the inner circle when when people don't know where are these sales coming from. Make sure you have all your systems set up. Make sure you have your Google Analytics set up, your Google Merchant Center set up, um, your uh Google search queries, all that stuff should be set up uh for your store. And it should be um integrated with Door Shopify so that you can see what's happening at all times. All right. Number five here is they underestimate how much time and energy a real business takes. So here's the reality it's it's a saturated market. People will say it's not a saturated market. Making candles, it's a saturated market. You just got to stick out because the majority of people are gonna give up. That's just the reality of it. They're gonna give up due to losing interest, which is completely okay, or they're going to finally make candles, finally be happy with the product, finally put out in the world, and then nothing happens. It's crickets, they're not getting the sales that they were hoping they would. You can have a nicer, perceived line of candles than us and not do anything and not sell anything. And why is that? Well, you you have to try all the different things that other people are trying, right? So don't compare yourself to what other people are doing, but definitely draw some inspiration and see what's working for other people. That's why we like to do things like this channel and share what's working for us at the current moment. So it is a lot of work. So back to this, they underestimate how much work it's gonna be. Making candles, sure, it's hard, but it is minimal compared to selling candles. Everybody can learn to make candles, right? That's why we we sell a course on how to make candles, exactly how we make candles. We sell that course and everyone can make candles afterwards. They reach out to us, we are their life for them to connect with. They are so confident with their candle making when they're done. That's step one. But then you have to actually be able to sell them. And you can't create a course of just, hey, how do you how do I sell candles? What's the one system? It doesn't exist. That's why we have the inner circle. That's why we meet every single week in office hours. What's working, what's not working. Let's look at our numbers. Let's look at your numbers, let's see what's working for you. Do you have all the right tools in place? Is your website optimized? Have you gone through the workshops? There's so much that goes into actually running a business. So don't underestimate or don't think that the candle making is actually the hard part because it's really going to be the business side. But don't let that scare you. You just have to know that it's going to take work and effort, right? When you when you cross that finish line of making candles, it's not just like raining money on the other side. And I'm just being real with you. We have invested so much more time and energy and effort into the business side because that's what it takes to be successful with a candle business. All right. Now we're going to pivot to theme number two, and that is that they don't build a community or confidence. Okay. So this is what we really kind of built the inner circle for. But I want to talk about these um things of why people tend to fail. So number six on this list of one to 15, number six is they don't collect emails or they don't build a community. So their sales never become repeatable. We should be collecting everyone's email and we should be emailing them consistently. Even if you have five customers, yeah, five customers, you should be emailing those five people every single week. And it's just gonna grow and grow and grow. And as your email list grows, your sales will just naturally grow as well. Anytime we need an influx of cash into our business, I'll just send out an email. That's it. I never send out an email that I don't get sales out of. That's just, you know, if you have a hundred emails and you send that out and one person buys one percent conversion rate on that, that's still pretty good. Okay. Now think about when that one list of 100 emails becomes a thousand. Okay. Now you're getting 10 sales every time you send an email out. 10 sales, our average sale is you know$55-ish. Um, that's$550 every time I send an email out. That's at 1,000 email addresses. Okay. As you scale, you're gonna keep going. So our email list is like 55, 5,600 people on our customer email list now. So you can do the math and see every time we send an email out, we're getting a little bump in cast coming into our business. Start early. Don't feel like, oh, I'm gonna wait till I get to a thousand emails to start email. People know. If you have five emails, start emailing them every single week. It might be crickets for a while. Don't get discouraged. Once you get over that hundred emails, I promise you, you're gonna start getting sales almost every time you send an email, which is just going to then reaffirm to us that it's working, and then you're gonna want to send more emails. And then you're just gonna build that whole revenue stream of sending out emails, getting money back. It's just every Friday, I'm gonna send an email, I'm gonna get money back. It's it's it's a it's a nice feature to have. Obviously, there's a lot that goes into making sure your emails uh work. You got to have the right subject lines, you have to have the right content. You can't just be sale, sale, sale, just like what we talk about in our social media and in our email marketing workshop. You need to have, you know, four different um content pillars uh that we call them of topics that these are about. But essentially, you got to have an email list. Okay. So that is going to be number six. Number seven um is that they're scared of marketing themselves because they don't want to become too salesy. That's why actually what I just talked about, the four different content pillars. We don't just promote on social media, this candle's on sale,$28, 25% off, buy today. Here, this candle's on sale, go buy today. We want to engage with our customers all the way back at number one, when you pick out a niche, that's what you're talking about a lot. If your whole line of candles is about metaphysical zodiac type of signs, right? Or you that you're a world traveler, or that you're a sports enthusiast. Whatever your niches, you're posting about that stuff. You're creating content for your customers to digest and take in. That's not even about just buy candles, buy candles, buy candles, right? So you want to diversify what your content is. And so you need to have that balance of you you have to promote your products, um, but you also want to promote other things within your space so that then yourself, you'll actually know that you're not being as salesy because you're actually giving your customers value beyond just your candles or your wax products that you're you're selling to them. Number eight, they don't invest in education or mentorship early on and instead rely on random Facebook group advice. Now, look, we can all learn stuff from Facebook groups. I'm not knocking them. I have my own Facebook group. I would actually love for you to come and join it. It's just Scandal Business Pro. You can find it. It's free to join. I would love to have you in there. But we can't just rely on just what someone on the other side of a keyboard is telling us, take that advice and then go and do that. We need to make sure we are in a space where we are confident in the knowledge that we're getting. So investing in education or mentorship. Now, of course, we have the inner circle. We have weekly office hours, monthly workshops, monthly family dinner. We do hot seats, all kinds of resources are already there for people to help them scale their business. And it's all based on our experience and what we're going through. Every week I talk about my numbers. Are we going up? Are we going down? What's working? What's not working? So whether or not you come and join the inner circle, make sure you have a community of other candle business owners. Whether that's two people, five people, a hundred, you want to start your own Facebook group, you want to come and join us inside of the inner circle. You have to have people around that understand what you're going through, that have been there, that will understand the highs and the lows. Look, being a solopreneur or entrepreneur can be lonely. People don't understand it, right? They don't get why we want to make candles, sell them to the world, and not work that nine to five job. Is that your dream? That was what our dream was. Or they don't, they just don't get the direction you're going. That might not be what they might consider normal. But we don't want to necessarily be normal. I want to do and live my life the way I want, and I enjoy running our candle business. So surround yourself with people. We would love to have you inside the inner circle, but invest in education, not just about candles, but about accounting, finance, marketing, branding, all these different aspects of running a business. Okay. So don't just take advice of, hey, how I'm not getting any sales on my website. How do I get sales on my website? Take that advice and actually do something with it. If you don't understand SEO, which is search engine optimization, if you don't understand it, that's fine. Right now, in the day and age of AI and the way people are using, say, Chad GPT and Claude versus Google, or in fact, Google now has Gemini. You can go right into AI mode on Google and search for something. You have to understand how all that works and how all of this correlates to what you need to be putting on your website for people to get your website in those search results. So it's very crucial that you understand how the website SEO needs to work. It's something we teach inside of the inner circle as well. But there's plenty of free resources out on YouTube. Just have to find someone that you can understand how they're teaching it. So hopefully that'll help you out a little bit. Invest. Also keep in mind whether you go through our courses, you buy courses online to help or assist you with anything, these are all tax expenses. Again, it's one thing that we have to learn. What's a tax write-off or what's a tax um deductible for a business expense? I keep that in mind. That like, for instance, anyone that's in our inner circle, every year, they're gonna write that off on their taxes as an expense uh for their business. So that's just another thing. You need to learn about um the IRS financing, entity setup, all that stuff that you can learn. You can learn that from anywhere. So just keep that in mind. YouTube is great. You can buy books from trusted resources. Just be cautious of using Chat GPT and trusting all of the results. Get a few different um angles from that. Because Chat GPT and AI is basically scraping the internet, getting information and putting in front of you what they think is the best answer. Sometimes it's not the right answer, though. So just keep that in mind. If you're questionable about something, if you're second guessing it, maybe look elsewhere for advice. Um, also, so that was theme number two. Let's recap real quick. Theme number one is the foundation was never built. You got to make sure you have a solid foundation. Theme number two is they don't build a community. Okay. Make sure you build a solid community of people around you to support you as a business owner. Now, theme number three is their brand doesn't feel like a brand yet. So, number nine in our list of one to 15 is going to be their branding feels homemade instead of intentional or cohesive. And I see this pretty often. Now, I'm not saying that you have to go out and have your labels professionally designed and then professionally printed. You can do them yourself inside a can. And in fact, inside of our uh candle making uh workshop, we actually give um those people um that take that uh a bunch of different Canva editable labels, right? You can hire someone on Fiverr Upwork for very inexpensive these days to do some graphic design work for you. You need to have cohesive branding. You want to look like you belong in that store that you're hoping to be in. We can't rely on white labels and black um minimalistic writing on them anymore. It's just gonna be too tough because that is super saturated. That's why all of our candles, we kind of went the opposite. All of our labels are super colorful. We have very simple jars, and our labeling does all the talking for our brand. They're all cohesive. No matter what collection, we're up to like six different collections of candles now. Regardless of what candle you pick up, it's still gonna be cohesive. Our fonts are going to line up. Um, the the way we use our logo is going to line up, even if they are way different collections of candles, it all seems cohesive under our brand. So it has to be a reality, kind of a gut check here of hey, do do my candle labels or does my candle packaging does it look homemade? It's one thing we promote hand poured, but we are still running a business and we still want to be respected in the business space, whether it's from retailers that we're trying to wholesale from, or even just customers out of markets. You know, why is it that some people are charging$10 for the candles out of markets and some people are charging$30? We're always the most expensive out of markets, but we're confident in our branding, we're confident in our presentation, and so then we're confident in our pricing. And so we're not comparing ourselves out there. So make sure that you're not, you're not doing that as well. But do a gut check. Is your branding where it should be? And now, branding isn't just your logo. So your branding, and I talk about this a lot in one of our branding workshops, is your your branding is gonna, there's seven different parts to your branding that's gonna include your logo, but it's also gonna include uh your colors, your fonts. It's gonna uh be the way that you can you communicate with others, it's gonna be about your mission, it's gonna be about your uh your values. All of these types of things um are gonna be under the branding umbrella. So don't just think of logo right away because your logo actually has nothing to do with branding if you don't have those other areas covered as well. Where people just seeing a logo is not going to care. Um, because it's it's about your branding, is how you make someone feel um when they have your products. That's what good branding is. It's not your logo. Okay. Now, the next thing, uh, number 10 here, why people seem to fail, is they don't show their face, share their story or their why. So their customers can't connect. Okay. You have to be front and center of a small business. We're small businesses. People have to be able to relate to us. They have to know us, they have to know our story. So on your website, there should be photos of you, whether it's you and your dog, you out on a boat, you hanging out with family, or you in your candle studio making candles. It doesn't matter what the photos are. People have to relate to them. Tell a little bit about your story. You need to be a little vulnerable because when you're vulnerable and you share a little bit, then people are gonna relate to that. And they're gonna say, you know what? That I can relate to that. I'm gonna buy these candles. I want to try these candles, I want to support this person. And then when they get those candles, they love them, they're gonna come back and support you over and over again, right? Get a little vulnerable with your customers. That has been something that's worked well for us. People in our town here, there's that's a 35,000 um population here in Holland, Michigan. We will be out at dinner and we get approached relatively often, once a month or so, or just in passing, oh, you're the candle guys, you're the candle guys, in reference to me and Chad, right? And it's either from they have visited our store or they're gonna see our ads on Facebook that we have uh targeted to our local population because we're again, we're trying to relate to people. So our Facebook ads that we'll run will talk about Holland, Michigan. I'm not just throwing these out there for the entire world and just hoping someone clicks on them. We got to be relate relatable to people. So I will run local-based ads and people so then they know that they're buying from someone local and they're supporting local. And so they'll see our face and then they will say something in public. And it makes us kind of feel really good. It feels good. All right. The next thing is um, this is number 11. For the reason why people seem to fail, or their their businesses seem to fail, I should say. Um, they chase trends instead of creating a long-term brand strategy. We see this often. Every time a supplier comes out with a new um collection of oils, people are all over them, buying them all up and then turning around and hoping to sell them to their customers, which is completely fine. But here's a problem, and I talk about this often. Here's a problem. If Candle Science comes out with eight new scents, at least six of those holiday scents are going to be gone and never come back. They're gonna be rebranded, reformulated, they're gonna come back next year, something completely different. So if you create, let's just say um mistletoe candle, just throw something out there. Here's my mistletoe candle. It is a clove, a nutmeg, and a spiced orange. Okay, this is my mistletoe candle, and I'm using this specific oil that I'm buying from the specific supplier. Okay. I'm getting labels done professionally. I want this all to look good because we just talked about it. We can't look homemade. We've got to look on point. We got to have our whole brand cohesive. I create this candle, I start selling it, my customers love it. And then that supplier stops carrying that because what they want to do is every year they want to they want to sell us new stuff, right? They don't want us to replenish our oils from last year that we still have half a five-gallon or half a five-pound um bottle of. They want us to buy brand new. That's how they stay in business. Nothing wrong with that. Um, but if we keep chasing trends every year, that means whatever extra um labels I could have had with that scent and those scent notes and things on it, I'm not gonna be able to use next year because it's gonna be a completely different formula. So chasing the trends is what I see often for people that end up not doing great or lasting in this business. All of our seasonal scents. And I'm I'm not saying don't buy the latest scents and trends. We like getting those just as much as everyone else. What we do is we'll take one of those scents that we love that's a seasonal, and we'll create that as our candle of the month. So every month we come out with a brand new candle that we only sell for that month, right? We make a limited edition, we create urgency around it. We have a whole subscription box service for our VIP or for our super fans that want to get a candle delivered by us every month. It's fantastic for buying for those hard to buy for people, things like that. That's why we have a subscription box. We will do the fun sense, the trending sense as that candle of the month because it's only gonna be available for that month. When it's gone, it's gone. So we don't care if that oil goes away or not. Um, so something to keep in mind there. Don't build a brand around what's what's trendy, or you're gonna end up with so much overstock of supplies, a little of this, a little of that. And that's all money. That's all money that you have sitting on a shelf that you really don't have too many options of what to do with. All right, we are moving into the final theme here, and that is having a hobby mindset versus a business mindset. So I've got four different talking points here for that. The first one for why some of the businesses fail is they treat it like a hobby, but expect hobby efforts to produce business results. Now, if you're just treating your candle making like a hobby, totally fine. You're putting in a little effort, you're getting a little return, you're happy, that is okay. That is fantastic. But you can't expect in this space to put in a couple hours of work and get thousands and thousands of dollars in return. It's just not gonna happen. It's just not going to happen until you scale up and you have some amazing systems in place. It is going to take running a business to make your small candle business work. If you're wanting to scale it, if you're wanting to go full time like what we did, you have to have that mindset. Again, making candles was easy. It's after making candles when the real work starts. Okay, I have my candles. How am I going to get these into homes of every single person in America? Right. God, that would that would be amazing. Um, so how do I get these candles into homes? You have to have a business mindset, and that is making sure your inventory is right, making sure that you have a little bit of work and capital for when things go wrong, making sure that you have a marketing budget, making sure that you're forecasting ahead, making sure that you have your social media and your email templates ready to go and you're you're scheduling all of that out. So you can do all of this while you're still doing something else. We had nine to five jobs when we first started our candle business. Four months later, we were opening our first brick and mortar store. And it's because we treated this entire thing as a business. So just keep that in mind. You can't just do part-time hobby. You can do this part-time, but you can't do like a hobby. You can't just put in one hour of work a week. It's just not gonna work. You're gonna need five hours minimum in this. But just think, come home from work, spend an hour every night on this, and you still have your weekends free. Obviously, you'd still you'd hopefully want to fill that up with doing markets and things like that to sell your candles and put them out in the world, but you also don't have to put in 20 hours a week, especially when we're first starting. What's gonna happen is you're gonna put in five hours a week. You're gonna start to see the results from that, and it's gonna want to make you want to put in more. Because when you start getting the results, that's when we start trying harder and harder, right? It's like if we are trying to lose weight and you know, you're on the treadmill every single day for a week and you you weigh yourself again and you've lost zero, you know, then it's like, then we want to give up. Then we want to say, you know, it's not working, I'm giving up. But if you lost a pound, maybe two pounds, you're like, oh, okay. It was worth the hard work that I just put into that. So I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna try it again. But you're gonna have those weeks where nothing's gonna happen. You're not gonna get any sales where you're not gonna lose any weight on the scale. Totally okay. Um, I'm referring to this because this is a struggle I always go through. I like my, you know, trying to lose some weight here and there, and then it's like, oh gosh, I did all that work this week, I didn't lose anything. We're gonna have that. We're gonna have also really, really bad weeks in our canoe business where we are not going to do what we're hoping for, whether it's just the economy, the politics, the weather for our brick and mortar stores, right? There's so many factors that go into a business that are out of our control. But what is in our control, we have to make sure that we have it all dialed in. All right. The next one here, number 13. Is they pour all of their time into making candles, but not into selling them. So we kind of really just covered that here and treating it like a hobby versus a business. Making candles is going to be the easy part. You've got to put in 10 times as much work to sell them. So just keep that in mind. If you are comfortable with that and are going to work hard, you're going to be successful. Just as easy as it is. It is easy if you have the mindset and you're going to put in the work, then you're going to get it done. So many people come and get advice and we talk about stuff and say, hey, these are the these are the so many different ways that you can sell candles. Go do markets. Make sure you have a fabulous website. Get into wholesale, do private label, do fundraisers. So many different options that people have. And they end up relying just on posting on social media and not understanding why they're not successful. Because social media alone is not going to make you successful. You can even go viral and get a hundred sales because you ended up on the news station or because you did a TikTok reel and it went viral. Totally fine. But you have to have other aspects of your business built out because it's not going to happen over and over again. Keep in mind there as you're as you're trying to scale this. All right. Number 14, we just got two more here. Number 14 is they get stuck in analysis, paralysis, and never actually launch. Don't overthink it. You do not have to be perfect to launch. As long as your safety, um, your candles are safe and you are 110% confident that there's no issue with that candle being unsafe. Once you're past that, don't overthink the candle brand, the website domain, the social media handles, um, your brand colors, all the stuff under the branding. We can work on all that together, right? You can go and take our branding workshops and you can go through a lot of stuff, but get your candles out in the world. You can always work on that stuff. We're almost four years in. We're three and a half, uh, almost four years into our business now. We've passed, you know, 1.5 million in sales. We've got 160 wholesale accounts that we're working right now. There's so many things that I still want to pivot on and change and tweak to make us better. Um, if I would have waited, we would have never got to where we are now and to where we want to go. There's always going to be something to work on. So keep that in mind. You're not going to be perfect, and that's okay. You don't need to be perfect. We're selling candles here, right? We're not trying to land on the moon. We're selling candles here. So um just get your get your products out there. That's what I like. I see so many people that, you know, whether it's the imposter syndrome, whatever is holding you back from launching, if you got a solid candle, launch it. If it's safe, launch. Get it out in there, get it out in the world. Um, you're gonna learn so much once you get it out there because you're not your customer, right? You have to sell a candle and you have to have someone on the other side of that transaction that's going to invest in you and buy your product. They dictate the direction your candle business is going to go. So, the quicker you get it to them, the quicker their feedback is going to dictate uh your growth of your business. So don't hold yourself back, right? So um get out of get out of your own way when it comes to that. You're gonna do fine. You're gonna do great. All right. The last one here is they quit too early because they expected fast results. And that's what most people end up doing. You end up spending six months figuring out how to make candles, you make candles, and within a month, you have quit and bounced. It's what happens almost every single time is you spend this much time learning to make candles and this much time trying to sell them. You post it on Facebook a couple dozen times, and you got very minimal engagement or reaction or conversions, and so you're out. And you say it's it's not for me, it's not gonna work. You've got to put in the work, build a community of people. Uh, whether it's us, come join us in the inner circle or in our free Facebook group. That's a great starting point. We give lots of uh tips, tricks, and advice in there, or just any other candlemaker that you know of that you seem to relate with. Talk this through. What's working for them? What's working for you? Trade ideas. Have a community that's gonna help you as a solopreneur grow so much by having a strong community around you. But don't give up too quick. You have to try. You have to try all those different avenues that I talked about with you. Direct consumers through your website, doing markets, using social media as a marketing platform, um, making sure that you have email marketing set up correctly, doing fundraisers, doing wholesale, doing private label. There's so many different ways that we sell candles. And you don't have to sell the exact same way. What's whether if it's you, your lifestyle? Yeah, we have a brick and mortar stores. That's not definitely, that's definitely not for everybody. That's it's a beast. Um, so there's plenty of ways to make money in selling your candles. You have to find which method is going to work best for you. But when we are first starting out, we do have to be a little scrappy. We do have to try a lot of different things and see what sticks. And don't try something one time and give up. Often I'll see people say, I did markets, they didn't do well for me. So I don't want to do markets anymore anymore. I want to do something else. Okay. If markets aren't doing well for you, if when you do a market, you have zero results out of that, then there's an issue with your candle brand, with your business. Everyone has an opportunity with markets to put their candles in front of potential customers, right? If it's not resonating with anyone, of course, there's gonna be some, there's plenty of really bad markets out there. And that's why you got to do a bunch of them. Do a bunch of markets. Then if you still have nothing, you gotta go back to the drawing board. Is it your branding? Is it your presentation? Is it you? Are you just sitting in a chair behind the cash register out of the market? Um, you know, what is it you're doing wrong? What is wrong? What can we change? And then reach out again, inside the inner circle in our Facebook group, reach out, say, hey, this is my setup. Is there a problem with this? Or is it my pricing? Um, what is wrong with my business model? And get some feedback from other people. Make sure there's people that you trust. Make sure when you do get feedback from other people, it's people that you trust and that they're actually doing it themselves. There's a lot of people that love to talk. I like to talk, I like to ramble on, but first things first, I'm out selling candles, running a business first. There's people that are going to give advice on how to sell candles and they've never done it, right? If I was to give advice on how to make pillar candles, how to make mold candles, um, don't take it from me because I don't, I can tell you how to do it. I think I know how to do it. Um, I've seen it enough, but I'm not actually doing it. So I can't give you the best advice. And there's a lot of people that'll tell you how to run your business that aren't running a candle business. So keep that in mind. That's why I do this. That's why I do have this channel. I put out these episodes every week to hopefully help you out. If you've enjoyed this, I would love it if you would just subscribe. If you subscribe, that helps my channel um go higher in the uh ratings for YouTube and all the podcasts to put it out to more people and hopefully help more people. And that's ultimately what I'm here for. So thank you so much for tuning in today. Have a fantastic rest of your week, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.