The final push

The last quarter of the calendar year is the biggest for many professional services businesses. A good final quarter pulls the business into the next year. So how do we map our final push for the year with launches?

Launching makes possible what one-to-one selling doesn’t by reaching strangers, selling through your content, creating urgency and making offers without relying on one-to-one sales calls. Launching isn’t just for people with group programs, masterminds, or big leveraged offers. It can be used to sell almost anything, including one-to-one done-for-you services. The end-of-year frenzy is coming. Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, holidays so how could you use the final quarter to create your biggest revenue quarter yet? If you’re keen on a big final push for the year, this episode is for you.

You’ll learn:

• Why most business owners have been creating new offerings upside down and back to front.
• Brook’s litany of spectacular flop launches, including the one launch she ghosted in favour of a worthy fascinating side quest involving a spreadsheet, a very full car, and an absolutely enormous amount of furniture.
• That horrible, barren wasteland in the middle of a launch when nobody seems to be buying? It might feel like failure. But what if it isn’t?
• There’s one thing you need to believe before you launch because secretly expecting your launch to fail is a bit like driving with the handbrake on.
• The uncomfortable lesson about success that capitalism and patriarchy has taught us that is massively hindering our launches – and what to do instead
• What it actually means to reach through screens to pluck the heartstrings of strangers, selling directly through your content
• How to make your offer relevant to what’s happening *right now* and the question Brook always asks about her ideal clients when creating launch marketing
• The difference between an audience and a community – and why it matters
• Why your launch strategy isn’t a content calendar.

Want to turn your launch into a genuine strategy rather than just a vibe and good intentions? This episode is invaluable.

Join Brook on September 24 for her free workshop, The Final Push: Map your Launch.

We’re getting stuck in together, to get all the important pieces down on paper, including your timelines, financial goals, audience-building, live experiments and everything that needs to happen before launch day.

Nab your spot now: https://www.hustleandheart.com.au/launch-season/

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Cammaraygal people here in Sydney, Australia.

In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work, and the meanings we derive from work.

Launching is where the rubber hits the digital marketing online sales road. Make no mistake, launching is not for the faint of heart.

If you want a lot of visibility, reach, sales, conversations, creativity, joy, and action in your business in a very short concentrated space of time, launching is where it’s at.

And I’m going to hazard a guess that launching is potentially the thing that’s missing from your service-based business.

You might be listening to this right now thinking, well, that’s all well and wonderful, Brooke, but I don’t have a premium group program. I don’t have a mastermind. I don’t yet have some kind of leveraged offer that lends itself to launching.

And if that’s you, I would strongly and lovingly suggest you’ve got it upside down and back to front.

Launching is how I’ve always worked in my business. And all it is, is putting a spotlight on your services and making it easy for people to reach out, inquire and purchase.

You’re giving them an urgent reason to do so. And you can do so in a variety of different ways.

I’ve got a grab bag of different tools, different techniques, different strategies to help incentivize, gamify, motivate people to actually reach out and purchase.

But the whole point of a launch is that you’ve got that sprint effect. You’ve got that short, sharp urgency and scarcity for people to purchase.

And of course, it’s going to be stressful.

Of course, you probably, if you had any experience of this at all, racked up a few launches that you probably perceived as failures.

God knows I have. God knows I have.

I have been launching since about 2012.

Prior to that, I did things which I would probably now today call a marketing campaign where I would spotlight my services.

I would create a dedicated campaign of content. And this is back in the olden days of the internet, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

I would spotlight one of my services and invite people to take the next step.

Now, just to kind of make you feel a little bit more comfortable, and in keeping with the theme of this season of the podcast, all about failure, I’m just going to detail a couple of quick launch flops that I’ve had.

One of them, of course, was the memorable launch that I ghosted.

And what I mean by that was things were going badly. I was sitting at my desk, looking at the data, looking at the lack of engagement, you know, every single minute felt like an hour and I was just like, God damn, this is horrendous.

Rather than staying in that uncomfortable feeling, and we all have those uncomfortable feelings and launches very, very normal, especially in the middle of a launch where you’ve got this barren wasteland of nothingness, which makes you question everything.

Very, very normal to feel this. Very, very normal to feel like it’s a flop. It’s a failure.

And God forbid to make it mean something about yourself and your extreme lack of abilities, et cetera, et cetera.

In this instance, rather than sit in the uncomfortableness and then use that uncomfortableness to do something, to change something up, instead, I ghosted my own launch.

I got extremely creative.

I got involved in a not-for-profit, a small not-for-profit that were doing a shout out for furniture from a woman that had fled a domestic violence relationship with three young children and needed to furnish an apartment.

So I took this job on and I posted in my local Facebook group, my local community group, and I was overrun with offers, which was amazing.

I had a spreadsheet going, I had addresses, I had 20,000 messenger messages. I was driving back forth, back forth, back forth, filling my car, scratching my car with furniture that my neighbors had kindly donated and filling up our lounge room.

Literally we had enough furniture that I could have furnished that apartment three times.

In fact, after the guy, the man with the van came and picked up a whole load. I think he did two loads.

I had extra furniture that I needed to distribute to various charities in my area.

All well and wonderful, right?

And you might be listening to this thinking, well done, broke, pat on the head, blah, blah, blah.

And it was a very productive procrastination, but make no mistake. It was procrastination. It was avoidance.

I was ghosting my own launch and I was ghosting my feelings of, my God, this is dreadful. I’m watching a car crash.

Nothing is happening.

Now it’s not a car crash. In fact, it is just a desert of no purchases, no activity, no engagement.

That is not a failure.

And there’s many, many, many, many things that you can do in that insufferable period in the middle of a launch.

When the initial flurry of purchases has died down and the end flurry that will come right before you close cart, right before you close the doors and the thing that you’re launching is no longer available.

That interminably long period in the middle, there are many, many things that you can do.

So make no mistake. Launching is not for people who are incredibly thin skinned.

You can successfully avoid launching. In fact, I have many clients who don’t ever launch.

All of the sales and the deal making that they’re doing is done one to one, face to face.

Launching is for those who wish to reach through screens and pluck the heartstrings of strangers, sell directly through their content, sell one to many.

Sell potentially without sales calls.

Sell productized packaged services. They don’t need to be courses or programs or masterminds.

They can in fact be productized services. There’s some kind of template offering.

I don’t love the word templated, but I think you understand the gist of what I’m saying. I hope you understand.

So to this end, I am going to host a free workshop and I use workshop on purpose.

It’s not a masterclass where I teach a new lesson. It is a workshop where we roll our sleeves up and we get stuck in.

And it’s all about the final push of 2026.

The final push, which is historically in the Southern hemisphere launch season and also in the Northern hemisphere, because in the Northern hemisphere, particularly in America, we have Black Friday, we have Thanksgiving.

We have that same end of year frenzy that happens and quite often in my business, the last quarter of the calendar year is the biggest quarter of the year.

Historically, that’s been the case.

It’s also historically been the case that I do get those kind of last minute people who right up until the Christmas break, well into December, are tapping me up for a VIP strategy session or they’re tapping me up, you know, to lock in one-to-one coaching in the following year, because they know that everybody’s shortly going to be distracted and off for their holidays.

So there’s no reason why you couldn’t map your last quarter launches with me to bring in the biggest revenue ever.

Why not? Why the hell not?

But firstly, and again, dear listener, because I need to remind you that it is all about failure, you need to honestly believe that this is possible.

Why?

Because to go into a launch, to go into launch season, secretly believing that this is not possible for yourself, secretly believing that it’s probably not going to work, that it’s probably going to be a failure is like driving with the handbrake on.

It is highly inefficient. It is very pointless.

And it blows out your tires. It makes no sense.

Yeah. It makes no sense.

Because right now the painful truth about launch season is that many of us, many owners are heading into launches, treating it like a solo mission.

And this is what we do, right?

This is what rotten capitalism and patriarchy has taught us. This is the propaganda that we breathe in every day.

Is that success only matters if it’s a solo mission, that we have to treat it as a solo mission, that anything of worth that happens happens through sheer grit by yourself, which is a total and utter myth, total and utter lie.

Nothing that you do as an individual is done solely by yourself.

We are through virtual being human, intimately interconnected and as business owners, recognizing and using this is smart strategy.

It’s creative and it’s resourceful.

It means that we are borrowing other people’s audiences to grow our own.

It means we’re borrowing other people’s audiences in paid live experiments.

We are asking, we are treating life like a pitch.

Life’s a pitch baby.

And not relying on telepathy for people to understand what we want and what we’re doing and what we need from them.

When we treat launching like a solo mission, we’re missing the actual fun of launching.

Because make no mistake, sales is social.

Even if it’s one to many, even if it’s primarily through screens and not through, you know, one-to-one conversation, it is still very much social.

What are we doing when we’re communicating?

We’re trying to tap into the cultural zeitgeist.

What are we doing when we’re launching?

We’re trying to make ourselves relevant, to make our offering relevant to the cultural zeitgeist.

We’re trying to figure out what are waking our ideal clients up at 2am and speaking to that.

We’re trying to figure out what people are obsessed with right now and making what we’re doing urgently relevant to that.

What are we doing when we’re launching?

We’re opening more conversations in more digital rooms.

We’re being creatively unhinged.

We’re flying our freak flag so that the other freaks can find us.

We’re not overlooking the people who would show up and champion us if only we just got over ourselves and actually asked.

When we treat launching as a solo mission, we’re so deep in the doing that we never step back to map the season as a whole to make sure that the maths actually maths, to make sure that we’re priced appropriately, to make sure that we’re communicating the value powerfully, to make sure that we’re taking that main character energy into our launches, that we are mesmerizing, that we are clearly and obviously having fun and that we’ve got the energy that other people want to be around because we’re going places.

Nobody’s following people who aren’t going anywhere, where they’re sitting in the same muck as they were yesterday and will be sitting in tomorrow.

I want to help you stop self-censoring your boldest ideas because the very same ideas that would attract these ideal clients aren’t seeing the light of day when you’re overthinking everything.

When you are creatively constipated and the worst part is that you know it, nothing good happens.

Nothing much happens at all, right?

It feels painful, it feels like burnout and oftentimes it is.

We don’t burn ourselves out by working too hard.

We burn ourselves out through overthinking everything.

We burn ourselves out by being misaligned between what we feel, what we believe, what we think, what we say, what we do.

There’s an incongruence there.

And if we’re posting on the internet with that incongruence, with that misaligned energy, people can smell it and it smells funky.

They don’t want to be around it.

So I’m running this workshop for free because this is what I do.

My philosophy on business has always been to give as generously as possible, one to many, to give as generously as possible in my marketing, to make anything and everything freely and readily available.

All of my frameworks, including the minimum viable marketing plan, including life’s a pitch are available for free on my website, hustleandheart.com.au.

Please come along, check it out.

We are going to put our brains to work and hopefully it will act as a rocket up your ass to make the last quarter of 2026 the biggest yet because why the hell could it not be?

The launches that I have done over the years that have felt like a joyless slog where I have barely survived and then crashed into Christmas to lie prone on the couch or prone on the beach, generally like devoid of life force, feeling utterly drained.

Those are the launches that I did where I was doing it in isolation, where I had imbibed the propaganda that nothing is of any worth if it’s not hard and it’s not done all by yourself.

The launches, on the other hand, that actually built momentum were also genuinely fun to run.

And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I know that’s not a coincidence.

They were the launches that I mapped first.

I knew what rooms I was opening, what conversations in which people I was gathering, which paid live experiments or unpaid live experiments.

I was brave enough to try in public and I knew it beforehand because I’d mapped it before.

This is not a content calendar.

We are not going to talk about all the nitty gritty detail of how many times you should post on Instagram.

That is the least interesting part.

The least interesting part.

And I say that after eight years of teaching social media marketing around Australia in various places, including under my own banner.

I flew myself around Australia for eight years.

And the nitty gritty technical detail is the least important part.

The most important part is figuring out what are the financial goals that we’re setting for ourselves.

Are these financial goals stretch goals that are actually slightly scary because they’re outside our comfort zone?

I’m not interested in tickling you and telling you everything’s wonderful and you should stay exactly where you are in your lovely comfort zone.

I’m interested in getting you out of your comfort zone and then making sure you have the exquisite support and self care that you need to make that comfort zone that you retreat back to as rejuvenating and fabulous as possible.

We’re going to get together and decide on timelines.

We’re going to get together and decide on gathering people, turning this into a real strategy, not a vibe, but a strategy so that your launch has a community behind it, not just an audience.

The role of paid live experiments and how these allow you to test and run things in public because of course the only experiment that counts in business is will people pay?

And you’re going to walk away having your final push for 2026 mapped, including exactly what this looks like.

This last stretch looks like before launch day.

So that is built on genuine excitement fueled by real strategy rather than empty adrenaline.

It’s going to be awesome.

And I cannot wait to see you there.

I’m going to include the link in the show notes.

See you for the final push.

Let’s go.

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review?

Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.