Hi there ,

I've got SO much news to share with you today. I'm all up for a bright shiny New Year, despite still the pandemic and all that goes with it.

• Saturday was our big 50th wedding anniversary. (Yes, we got married young!) We couldn't have the big celebration we've always wanted but we still had a great day. You can check out Facebook for our post about it, if you want, right here.
• Failures - that is the word of the day, I swear! But taking them in stride and having a Plan B is part of being a business owner. So here are two current failures I've had.

I sat down to write you this email only to find that my usual email service had a big issue and advised not to use it until next week. What?!? So, since I've been using SendFox for a few little email lists I just imported all my Confident Marketer subscribers into SendFox and am sending you this using my backup. Lesson for biz owners: have a plan B and don't panic, just fix what you can and move right on.

Worse than my email service failing me, this week I had planned to teach my 5th annual Visioning Workshop, which I do at the first of each year. But guess what? Only one person signed up to participate, so that was a big fail. BIG fail! Usually I have at least 10 or 12 who want to work on their vision for the year. So what went wrong? It could be many things.

• My clients and followers are not into vision boards right now.
• My copy for the workshop sucked.
• I didn't advertise it widely enough.
• I marketed it to the wrong people.
• The pricing was either too cheap or too much.

I'm not sure which of these it is - I have some ideas, though. And it's up to me to 1) figure it out 2) decide if I still want to offer this at all 3) if I don't want to, what will I do to replace that offer?

The takeaway for you is this - failure happens in all businesses. There's no shame in it. The shame comes from hiding out and quitting when something goes wrong.

Here's what is on tap this week:

Let's Talk (for women) at 3 PM ET the first three Mondays of January. If you are not registered for this complimentary meetup you can click here and get the meeting access information after signing up.

If you know someone in the travel industry I'm hosting my very first On Zoom Live on Thursday to talk about finding your true niche and marketing to it in travel.

My CEO Circle has an open Zoom drop-in time coming up this week, too. If you are not in my CEO Circle and want to join a small group of women focused on their personal and business growth get the details here.

To your sweet succes,

Sue Painter

PS - Here's 12 tips from cosmetic entrepreneur Bobbi Brown. Have you used that makeup brand?