Today I’m sharing my lessons of launching my mastermind, Show Up & Lead. My last launch created my biggest launch and 100% retention. I’m sharing five lessons I’ve learned through the failures and successes. Scroll down to view a transcript of the episode.

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Show Up & Lead Mastermind: Get on the waitlist here. Show Up & Lead is a 6-month mastermind serving WOC Coaches, Course Creators, and Online Educators to master marketing that actually converts, get fully booked, and become the CEO your business needs.

What’s Included in SUL:

• 3-Day Live Event in Los Angeles, California, beachside 
• 6 Months of Coaching led by Me
• Fully Booked in 6 Months Curriculum 
• Advanced Content Marketing Course [NEW]
• A community of brilliant and ambitious Femmes/WOC coaches, healers, and online educators
• Community Chat group to celebrate and support each other 
• Peer Coaching 
• Access to over 30 courses & trainings within my retired education portals including launch, marketing, and sales planning and strategies that have transformed dozens of my client’s businesses

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Watch Cat’s FREE training: How to Sell Out 4-Figure Offers.

For more on Cat Del Carmen, follow her on Instagram @CatDelCarmen and visit catdelcarmen.com

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Transcript:

What is up y’all? Welcome back to Latinas Booked Out podcast. I hope you’re doing well. I am so excited for today’s episode. We are talking all about my last launch. It was my biggest sales month to date. It was my biggest launch, and I think in general it was the least… it was like the chillest launch.

It wasn’t chill, but it was the chillest launch. I didn’t have a mental breakdown. I didn’t go too crazy. I had a lot of fun during this launch, so I’m excited to talk about it. But before we get into the actual topic of today’s episode, I want, I wanted to give you a little update. Let me start with this.

I decided to get into a money coaching program. It’s a money mastermind actually. Since I’ve been in this program, I have been challenged to really decide what I want to do with my money. Now I’m gonna give you extra details on the podcast. My husband and I sold our home. I think I might have talked about this a little bit on the last episode, but I’ll keep it short.

We sold our home in Oakland, California in 2022. Apologies. And we sold it for a lot of money. It was a lot, a lot, a lot of money. And we made a lot of money because we bought that home as a fixer. And we, so we made a whole lot of money, a whole lot of cash, and we decided that when we sold that house, we obviously wanted to buy a house down here in LA and we did some things with that money.

We paid off our student loans. We paid off, I think one of us had a card payment. We took care of, we didn’t have too much debt outside of our student loans, but we basically cleared all the debt and we bought our home. But we did put some money away in this bank, which the bank actually collapsed, but we put some money with First Republic Bank because they helped us get our interest rate for our home when we bought it much lower.

So they were like, Hey. This is, this is not exactly how it went, but basically they were like, if you guys can keep, I think it’s like somewhere around eight grand in our bank, then we can lower your interest rate as long as that money’s in there for like two years or whatever. Something like that. So of course we did that when we bought our home so we could have the lower interest rate.

But recently when there was a whole bunch of banks that were like collapsing, including Silicon Bank, one of ’em was our bank, which was First Republic Bank, and we as before, like all of it went down, we pulled our money out and we’re like, let’s get out of this. And so we’ve been sitting on this money.

And we’ve been deciding like, what are we gonna do with it? What do we wanna do? Do we wanna just throw it in stocks? Do we wanna do this? But I’m also a part of this Money Mastermind and the Mastermind’s all about like deciding what you wanna do with your money and really making some big, you know, money decisions and.

Hubs and I decided we are buying an investment property for sure. And here’s the exciting thing, we decided, I think this is decided we might change our mind, but it’s pretty much decided that we are buying a vacation rental home for us in the mountains. So we’re. Looking at different mountain homes like cabins for us to enjoy with our family, but also make some money off via Airbnb.

And I don’t know if I wanna do a whole podcast on this, but there’s a big lesson here because the bit honest truth is we can do a lot easier things with this money. We could just throw it in stocks. We can buy an investment property and just have like a rental income every month, and we’re deciding to do it through Airbnb because we really want a space.

For our family to be able to go to and enjoy. That feels like a little vacation. And I was telling my husband this, I would really like a space for our family to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor in our family dynamic. Like my husband and I. We are definitely the ambitious ones in our entire family and we, I mean, I don’t know everyone’s financial situation, but like I’m pretty confident that we are the first real wealth builders, like the real wealth builders.

And I say real meaning like we have a money portfolio, we have a stock portfolio of real estate portfolio like. We’ve bought and sold more than anyone in our family. We take a lot of risks, like we do these things right, and I, we decided that it would just be so nice for our family who has seen our sacrifice, who.

We love to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor, and it would bring me so much joy for my mom to always be able to be like, oh, I wanna go to, I wanna go take a little vacation and go stay at the cabin if I want a vacation and it’s available to her. I feel like that would be such a luxury, it would be such a dream in reality, um, to be able to like, Like for her to do that and to know that like her daughter’s cabin is always open for her.

So anyways, we’ve made this decision and it’s really exciting. Paul and I are looking at houses, at cabins, at homes, um, and we’re, we’re doing it. We’re doing it. If we change our mind, I’ll let you know, but right now we’re a little, we’re a little nervous, but that’s okay. That’s so normal. Uh, the home is a lot less than our house, so.

It’s all good in the hood. All right, y’all, let’s get into the lessons of this, this launch. So I had so many lessons, y’all, so many lessons during this launch of Show Up and Lead, and I wanted to share them with you guys. Before a as they were fresh. And I just wanna like really give you an understanding of the lessons, the things that I have learned through this process.

This is the third time that I’ve launched show up and lead, and I’ve just learned so much. So I’m gonna share five less lessons with you. And yeah, take note. Take, take. Listen up. Take some notes if you want. This is a lot of learning, so it’s gonna be good. But before that, I wanna remind you that if you have listened to this podcast, let’s see.

If you’ve listened to this podcast and you have gotten value from it, it would mean so much to me if you shared it on your Instagram stories, shared it on Facebook, or shared wherever you hang out most. Um, especially if your crowd is full of coaches, it would mean so, so much to me. So, all right, let’s just get things moving.

Let’s get things shaking. Um, Because there’s so many other things I wanna talk to you about, but I won’t, I won’t take up too much at this time. Okay. Let’s just start with the lessons. So let me give you some details about this launch. Okay. This launch was the show up and lead. It’s for my program called Show Up and Lead Mastermind.

And this program, this is the third time that I have launched it. And I’m gonna give you all the details. So the first launch of this Mastermind, um, let’s see, I signed 11 people into the program. The majority of them were one-on-one clients that ended up joining the Mastermind. And, um, yeah, and I think I got, I, I, I forget how many people joined outside of my clients, but I got 11 people in the group.

It was pretty amazing. And the second launch, I had such an up and down launch. First of all, I was literally like three. Four months postpartum. I was in a very, in a mental, I had, I was going through insomnia. I was having huge anxiety, lightweight depression. It was just a very hard time. During the second launch, which was the end of last year, so the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, I decided to relaunch.

So, In that, in that launch, I brought in eight clients, um, into that launch. Okay. So eight clients into that launch, 11 prior, learned a lot of lessons. The second time, I thought it was a complete failure at first, but I really decided to pour into this program heavily, like just pour my energy into this program and this time around for the third launch.

The stat that I am most proud of is that a hundred percent of my clients who are in the current round of the Mastermind decided to join the second round of the Mastermind. That kind of blew my my, and so that was 11 people. I’m sorry, that was eight people. And then we got, um, an additional four people.

So we have 12 people in this program now. 12 people times 6,000, which is the value of the program or the cost? The, the price of the program. That’s 72,000. And then I ended up signing one, one-on-one client and then, um, I was supposed to have a second. Didn’t work out, but. There you go. It’s $82,000. I was so happy about this.

I, I, I was just really happy about the launch. But let’s go through the lesson. So I, those are the details. That’s the program, that’s the money side of things. Okay. But I want. I wanted to share lessons on not only why this was a successful launch, but the lessons that I’ve learned in the last three launches.

Like what has led me here, cuz it’s, I’m 80, we’re 82,000. 72,000, right? Like, we’re getting close to a hundred. I know a six finger launch is in the, you know, it’s, it’s. It’s, it’s gonna happen like sooner than later, which is such a blessing. But yeah, so, so like I’m seeing it coming and I wanted to document the lessons that I’m learning right now.

So I got five of them. Five of them. Let’s get started. Number one, number one. One thing that I’ve learned in scaling my business is that you are required to try new things. You will be required to try new things. Look, there is a time in your business where you really focus on getting good at the one thing.

There’s a time in your business where you just wanna get really, really, really good at what you do, right? You wanna get really good at sales and marketing. There’s a time in your business where that is the priority. And then there’s a time in your business, and I, and I find this, it happens when you’re scaling to a new milestone.

There’s a time in your business where you have to try something new. You have to. Have a different approach. You have to shake things up, and when you shake things up, it’s scary. Like it’s just scary. It’s a hundred percent scary. You’re not sure if it’s gonna work. You’re not sure if this is the right direction.

You’re not sure, like all of it, you’re not sure about, and that is important. For you to try new things, test old, like you have to test new things out. You can even test old bad habits and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll explain like one thing for sure. That I have come back to in my business is I have a very, like I, I, when I scaled from like 10,000 to 200 k, I had a very simple, simple marketing strategy, but it was different than what I was doing at the 10 K level, like when I was selling like $10,000.

10. I was like 10 to $20,000 worth of coaching. I was selling it differently than I did when I scaled to 200 K. And the difference was really, I focused on making things extremely easy for myself, extremely simple for myself, and I. Wanted to allow a streamline for me to have an idea and for me to out put it out into the world, and I wanted to make that process as simple as possible.

I did, and I did it really well, and I made a lot of money. But as I’ve grown this launch, a big, big, big challenge for me was I wanted to automate a lot more of my content. And in this. Launch. I did that. I did that. In some ways, I think the next one will be much more, but this round I automated so much more content with my team.

They, they automated it, I should say, and I just led my team differently. So, And I saw it in the results. I saw it with the amount of output. I, I had a lot of people reach out to me, um, telling me that they could tell this launch was like different and fresh and all of this stuff. And I really enjoyed watching the launch from a bird’s eye view.

Like I had fun trying new things, although it was scary cuz trust me, my brain. Would be like, are you sure this is the right decision? You’ve never done this before. People want your this kind content, not this kind of like my brain wanted a spin about it and it did. I let it do its thing, but at the end of the day, I really had to commit to the new things I wanted to try.

I had to commit to the new things I wanted to try because here’s the thing, you can learn how to not. Sabotaged yourself. Let me, let me explain. If you are doing the same thing over and over and over again and it is not working, that is the problem. That is a problem. We don’t wanna do things that don’t work over and over, go over again.

Now, I’m not saying if they don’t work, like especially I’m thinking of people who sell one-on-one. Like if you have one bad month, then I don’t want you to ha think that there’s like a huge problem. No, there’s gonna be ups and downs and that’s fine. But I do want you to be able to recognize when some, when you have to change something in your business when it is not working, and you have to change something, and I want you to be willing to try new things.

Now, when I made the decision to kind of transform my launch content, I did it very intentionally. Like I had a plan. I mean, I, I didn’t have like a solid plan, but I had an overall plan and I executed it with my team. So there are going to be things that, you know, you wanna, you wanna be intentional about it, but you also want to leave room to just learn and play and see what happens.

And I think about some of my mentors of when their content really transitioned from like in the moment, super inspiring, blah, blah, blah, content to. An automated content model that is like less personal. I think I have like a thing that if my content isn’t personal, then it’s not as good and it’s not true, and I’m learning that over and over and over again.

So lesson number one is you are required to try new things in your business. You’re required to try new things in your business. Some, there are going to be phases and chapters in your business where that is going to be the challenge. And I want you to dive into that and I want you to know that it’s safe there and I want you to give yourself a lot of grace when you do that because there’s a lot, lot, lot to learn.

Okay, number two. You need to stop telling yourself that you are doing it wrong, y’all, there is no perfect way to launch, even when you’re working with a coach and they have a process that they teach, it is okay for you to always have like the agency in your business to make the executive decisions.

There’s no wrong way to launch. There’s no wrong way to launch. This launch made me really understand that there is no fast forwarding to success. You don’t just get to like fast forward to a hundred K launches. No. You have to grow the experience. You have to put in the work. People with more experience in some way, shape or form are better at what they do.

It’s just true, and we can compare ourselves to this person or that person, but the honest truth is that’s if somebody has more experience, they’re likely going to be better at it. Not always, but likely. I like to tell myself a story, especially if you’re like in that comparison mode at all. I tell myself a story that like they put in the work.

I haven’t put in the work yet. I don’t even know what that work looks like. Like if we want million dollar fricking, I don’t know, launches, one day I’ll have a million dollar launch. But if we want million dollar launches, a hundred K launches, right? Like if you want that. You have to accept that there are problems that you do not even know are very scary to you, that you’re going to have to go through.

You just have to accept that it’s the truth. It’s the truth I, so you are going to have to accept that, like look, the people with more experience, the people who are doing better. They put in work. You didn’t. Let’s just be a hundred. Let’s just be a hundred with ourselves about that. There’s work that they’ve put in that you have it.

It doesn’t mean you are bad, and it doesn’t mean that you should have shame around that. It just means you’re a different whole human and you’re at a different hole pace, and that is okay. It’s okay. It’s okay to be at your pace in your business. It’s your business. Let people be on their own pace. I promise you, it serves you better when you stop looking at other people and what they’re doing and why they’re so good, and why is it so easy for them?

La la, la. Get on your lane, figure out what’s happening in your business. Do the work you have to do in your business. I promise you. That that is going to help you so much more. Rather than rushing and trying to navigate all the waves of all the waves of growth, I feel like rushing. It’s okay to have momentum.

It’s okay to have energy. It’s okay to feel like you wanna go fast a little faster, but rushing and trying to force the growth. No bueno. No bueno. Stop telling yourself you’re doing it wrong. Stop telling yourself that you are missing something, that you’re, you gotta figure out what, what is it that you’re missing?

You’re not missing anything. I do want you to solve for problems in your business. Solve for problems in your launch. Try to like find new ways to kind of go at it, but I don’t want you to. Make up the story that like, you’re not doing it right and that’s why you’re not getting the result, because you can also just say, you know what?

I’m gonna get the results that I, my nervous system is ready for. I’m gonna get the results that like I’ve, that I’ve earned, and I’m willing to navigate this until I figure out my next milestone. Telling yourself that story is so much more valuable to yourself, so much more valuable to you. You show up calmer, better confident when you’re telling yourself that story instead of, what is it that I’m missing?

What am I gonna figure it out? La, la, la, la. It’s just true. Okay. Number three, practicing optimism. Will make this process easier. I know some of you hate this, hate this answer or hate this like tip this lesson, but practicing optimism. Will make this process easier for you? You must start looking at your success differently.

You must start looking at what is working. You have to, as the owner of your business, as the c e O of your company, the person that is leading it to its growth, your job is to stay optimistic. And I know that’s hard sometimes, and that’s okay. I’m not saying you have to be optimistic all the time. But you do have to go back to optimism, and you do have to go back to telling yourself a story that helps you show up for your business.

You have to tell yourself that story because if you get on the train of like, my, everything’s so hard, and why is this so hard for me, and why is this so easy for everyone else and la la la, la? Like, it’s okay for your brain to think that way. You have a human brain. Of course it’s gonna think that way, but what’s not okay is entertaining that over and over and over and over again when you are creating.

$80,000 launches or $80,000 months. There is not a lot of room. There’s not a lot of room to stay in, a cycle of negative thinking. There’s just not that much. There’s, it’s just. You can’t, you can’t like make this much money and just be super, super dived in, dived in, super focused on negative things happening in your business.

Unless you’re making like millions and millions already, then maybe I can see that. But, Yeah, you have to practice optimism. You have to look at things and say, huh, okay, well, all right, how are, how we got this? How are we gonna get it? Make it better? How are we gonna get more people in? This didn’t work. I wonder why.

I wonder what the lesson is here. That’s what I asked myself a lot. This launch, I asked myself so much, what is the lesson here? I prayed about it. I was like, God, please let me see the lessons. Let me find them quickly.

You have to look at your business from a lens, from an optimistic lens. And then when your brain is like kind of flipping out and you’re like, you know, getting into scarcity mode, that’s okay. I don’t want you to be like 9 1 1. This is horrible. I’m not supposed to be thinking that way. No, you’re always going to think that way cuz you are a human being with a human brain.

Okay? So I never want you to think you’re bad for thinking a certain way or having scarcity thoughts or whatever. But what I do want you to do is just look at that from the, look at the negative thinking from the outside looking in and be like, okay, I feel you. Okay, but what do we want to think? What do we want to feel?

The way I explain this to my clients, it’s like, Here, here’s what happens. Cuz here’s the truth is we have good days. We have bad days. Sometimes it’s just harder to go to work, and that’s okay. You’re, you’re a human and sometimes it’s easier to go to work. So on the days when it’s hard to go to work and you are in a spiral of negative thinking and you are feeling super emotional about your launch results or like whatever the case is.

When you are there and you’re like, oh, but Kat said I need to get into optimism, blah, blah, blah. Like, how am I gonna do this when I’m feel like shit, blah, blah. Right? When you are in that cycle, what I really want you to do is I just want you to look at what your business needs for you to do. And I want you to put your work hat on just the same way you would put it on at work.

Just the same way you like the skills that you have aren’t gone because you’re depressed or they’re not gone because you’re feeling a certain way. Skills or skills, you have them. You could just hop in and out of them. So when you’re working, especially during a launch and you’re spinning, so much of your time is going to be processing your emotion, being kind to yourself that that’s so productive in a launch.

But when it feels hard to show up and practice that optimism, what I want you to do is really think of it as like, I’m just gonna go to work for the next hour, and in the next hour, I’m not gonna entertain the negative, the negativity just for an hour. I’m not gonna entertain it. I’m just gonna work. And then as soon as you take that hat off and you’re done working, you go be negative Nancy, if that’s what you need to be.

I get it, I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve been there. But it’s when you’re entertaining it over and over and over again, that’s when it’s so, so harmful to you and your business. Okay, number four, set smaller goals. Stop trying to like do the most. When you don’t have the proof of it. So like one thing I’m gonna do now is like my success is gonna be so incremental.

I’m like the next launch, I’m raising the price for sure. And I’m expecting like half the people, like I’m just gonna expect half the people at the higher price. I could. In my head, my brain wants to be like, well, sh haven’t we like earned this? Like, haven’t we earned an a hundred K launch? Like, why are we like, I should still at least get this much people, la la la la.

Like, I could go in circles of why I deserve all of the clients at this, at my new price still because I’ve given so much value to my current clients at this price and la la la la. Like I could tell myself that story. But that’s all ego driven. Or I could just be like, Nope, I’m gonna change the price.

It’s now $10,000 and I’m going to, and I’m going to expect a lower number of people. Not from a place of like, I don’t have big goals, but from a place of. I’m willing to, like, I’m always willing to do, to focus on the growth and and grow one thing, step at a time. And also I’m coming out with another offer soon and I know that that’s going to affect.

My mastermind numbers, I as assume I, I think it will affect my mastermind numbers too, so like I’m really looking at my business holistically and making these decisions. But for you, I really just want you to set smaller goals and focus on incremental success success. Focus on putting one foot in front of the other and focus on becoming better.

Like you becoming better, not just expecting the results. How are you becoming better? How are you becoming better at what you do?

So set those smaller goals. That was so helpful for me in this launch. I set a very realistic goal. I think my goal was 10. For the launch. And yeah, I felt once I hit it, I felt great and I, I, I still got in my head a little bit, but for the most part I was feeling really good about it and I was just really ready to serve the 10 that joined.

But we ended up with 12, which was great. Okay. Number five, I always want you to focus on the long-term vision of your business. Every launch gets easier, especially if you’re a business who launches. Every launch gets easier every time you launch. It will get easier if you decide to open the, the cover of your launch and really fix what didn’t work so, And decide what did work and repeat those things and figure out where your growth is.

But your launches don’t have to be dreadful. They don’t have to be extremely hard, but they do require you to really look at the long-term vision of your business. So you aren’t looking at every launch as needing it to be successful. You’re looking at every launch and you’re willing. To grow in this launch, you’re willing to just like, see what happens.

Let’s, let’s give it our all and see what happens. There’s a different energy there.

Having the long-term vision helps you see like, okay, I am gonna make a million dollars at some point, but it’s not gonna be right now. So, If it’s not gonna be right now, who do I wanna become? What do I wanna do? You always get to decide your growth, and what I ask is look at the long-term vision. Don’t get stuck on like, oh, but if I don’t get this number, then this, it means X, Y, Z.

No. All of this, all of all launches are teaching us different things. They’re all teaching us different things. So if it’s teaching you a lesson, I want you to grab that lesson. I want you to own that lesson

so that the next launch gets easier and simpler. And the next launch, you have enough energy to try some new things and. You know, shake things up and then the next launch you, you, you make it better and whatever the goals are for your programs, but look at the long-term vision of your. Program, but also of your business.

This was so helpful to me this last launch. I just remember telling myself like, it’s okay. Let’s try this. Let’s try this. It’s okay. It’s okay. If this doesn’t work, it’s okay. If that didn’t work, it’s okay that you messed up here. It’s okay that like your, you know, a couple, a couple things really did go wrong in this launch and I, a lot of the time I just let myself, I told myself it is okay and it’s fine and it’s not an emergency.

Having a long-term view of your business helps you look and stay committed at the to the journey because it’s hard.

All right, y’all. That was my lesson. That was my lesson today. If you are interested in being a part of show up and Lead, make sure to get on the wait list below and if you wanna work with me one-on-one starting now, I invite you to apply using the link below as well. If you have any questions, you can DM me on Instagram at Cat del Carmen.

Or you can email my team at support at Kadel. Carmen, I’m opening up, or no? I have, let’s see. I have two spots available in the next two months for one-on-one coaching. So if you are interested, I invite you to join so we can get you where you wanna be by the end of the year. All right, y’all. I will see you later on the other side.

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