The Influential Practitioner
Episode 5: It's Not You, It's the Build: What to Do When a Launch Flops
Transcript
Episode number five of The Influential Practitioner.
Every business has two versions: the one people see, and the one only you see. The one people see has a nice website, the podcast, the program with a waitlist. The one only you see has a workshop where only four people showed up, and two of them were your friends. The email you rewrote six times that barely got opens. The offer you were so sure about that sat there untouched for weeks. Most of us are comparing our back office to everyone else's storefront, and that comparison will convince you that you're the only one struggling. You're not. If something you built isn't working right now, stay with me. This one is for you.
INTRO
Welcome to The Influential Practitioner. I'm Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, podcaster, and founder of The Wholesome Lotus. I built this show around one truth I had to learn the hard way: if you want to heal more people, you have to reach more people. This is where practitioners learn to market from alignment, move through doubt, and become more influential in their communities. If this is you, you're in the right place. So let's get started.
EPISODE
Welcome to The Influential Practitioner. I'm Michelle Oravitz, and today we're talking about failure. The real kind. Not the poster version, where every step back is a secret gift and you can see the lesson while it's happening. I mean the kind where you check the sign-up page three times in an hour. Where you start to wonder if you misread the whole thing. Maybe you're good at your clinical work, and that is where it ends.
It hasn't always been easy for me. I've had launches that didn't land, ideas that didn't catch, and seasons where I doubted almost every decision I've made. I've sat with that “who am I to be doing this” voice more times than I can count. I'm not gonna walk you through a tour of my lowest moments. That isn't what helps. What helps is understanding what actually is happening when something doesn't work, and knowing what to do next. That's where we're going today.
Let's start small, because the small ones are what get you. The big failures you remember. You can point to them. The small ones pile up, and after a while they start to feel like a verdict. A post that you loved but went nowhere. I still get this wrong. I'll make something that says exactly what I believe, in exactly the words I want, and it barely moves. Then something I throw together in ten minutes takes off. If you've been posting for any length of time, you know that feeling. It's humbling, and it never fully goes away.
A workshop you planned and promoted, and you watched the registration number just sit there. A lunch-and-learn where the room was half empty. A discovery call that felt amazing, but followed by nothing. No reply. None of those is dramatic on its own. But stack twenty of them across a year and you start telling yourself a story. People don't want this. I'm not cut out for the business side. Maybe I should stick with patients and stop trying. I think a lot of practitioners are living inside that story right now without realizing it's a story. It feels like a conclusion. It's really just a pile of small moments that were never looked at clearly.
There's another kind that doesn't look like failure at all from the outside. Doing too much. Saying yes to everything. Every collaboration, every “can I pick your brain,” every free call, every project someone else is excited about. From the outside you look busy and generous and everywhere. From the inside you're tired, and without meaning to, you're teaching everyone around you that your work doesn't need to be paid for.
I've been there. It took me a long time to see, because it felt like being needed. It felt like generosity. And it was generous. But generosity without boundaries is a slow leak, and what leaks out is your capacity to build the thing that only you can build. That's the sneaky part. At the end of the month you've done a hundred things, and none of them was the one thing that would have changed your year. Nobody calls that failure, but it keeps you from the few things that would move you forward. Every yes to someone else's thing is a no to your own. Once that sank in for me, saying no stopped feeling unkind. It started feeling like a decision about what I was building.
Let's bring this into the treatment room, because that's where I learned to think about setbacks long before I applied any of it to business. I work with women trying to conceive. Their path is made of many attempts that didn't work. A cycle that didn't end up in a pregnancy. A transfer that didn't take. Months, sometimes years, of trying and starting over. If anybody understands what it means to keep going after something doesn't work, it's them.
Sitting with them has changed how I see a cycle that doesn't work. I see a body doing something incredibly complex with the conditions it has. Sleep, stress, circulation, nourishment, how safe their system feels. When those shift, the outcome can shift. So that's where my attention goes. What's there, what's missing, and what can we support. And the way she reads it matters so much. If she decides something is wrong with her, the only place left to go is despair. And if she can see her body as intelligent, responding to what it's been given, she has something to work with. It's the same body either way. The path just looks completely different.
And think about how you'd approach a treatment plan. You'd never judge it based off of one session. You wouldn't look at a patient after their first appointment and say, well, that didn't work, let's stop. You know healing takes time. You know the body needs time and repetition and adjustments along the way. At some point I had to ask myself why I was treating my business the exact opposite way. One launch fell flat and I'd decide something was wrong with me. One class didn't fill and I wondered, should I stop altogether? I was doing to myself the one thing I'd never do to a patient.
If you're a practitioner, you already carry this wisdom. You use it every single day. You just haven't turned it towards yourself yet. But here's the thing: your business is intelligent too. It's responding to the conditions it has, and it's telling you what's missing, if you're willing to read it as information instead of judgment.
Before we get to how to read failure, let's talk about when. Most of us try to figure out what went wrong the same night it goes wrong. The numbers are low, and we're up at eleven at night rewriting the sales page and questioning the whole business. That's the worst possible time to do it. You know this from your work. When the nervous system reads a threat, it narrows. Attention tightens, and the body shifts into protection. The mind follows. Everything starts to look like evidence for the scariest possible conclusion. Fear contracts. And that has nothing to do with character. It's how we are wired.
And a launch that flops does register as a threat. It touches money, identity, belonging, and the fear of being seen trying and falling short. Your body doesn't know the difference between “the webinar had low turnout” and “I'm not safe.” It simply responds. So you can't truly read the data clearly from there. You'll read it as a verdict every single time.
What I'd suggest is exactly what you would suggest to a patient. Regulate first. Give it a day or two. Move your body, get outside, breathe, do whatever brings you back to yourself. Let that charge move through before you go looking for meaning in it. Then, when you sit down to debrief, separate the data from the drama. Write down what actually happened in plain numbers. How many people saw it, how many people clicked, how many signed up, how many people showed up. And leave the interpretation off the page for now. Numbers without the story are so much easier to learn from. Low views point to a completely different problem than lots of clicks and no sign-ups. You can only see that when you're settled enough to look without flinching.
Now, how to read it. When something doesn't work, the default reading is personal. I'm not good enough. My audience doesn't care. I'm not the kind of person this works for. That reading is almost never accurate. It gives you nothing to do. The reading I now use is structural. When something doesn't work, something was missing from the build. Not from me. From the build. The missing pieces tend to be the same handful, and I bet you'll recognize at least one.
You opened the doors before anyone knew there was a door. You spent weeks building the offer and a few days telling people about it. An audience needs time to warm up. They need to hear you talk about the problem for a while before they're ready to hear about the solution.
So, getting clarity. You described it the way you understand it, but not necessarily the way she might experience it. You might know the program from the inside. You know the modules and the method and why it fits together. But someone lying awake at two in the morning isn't searching for a method. She's searching for relief. If she can't see herself in your words within a few seconds, she's going to keep scrolling. That isn't rejection. It's just that she did not recognize herself in your writing.
And warmth. You asked cold people for a warm decision. Someone who found you yesterday isn't ready to invest in six weeks with you. Someone who's been listening to you for months might be. If your list or your following is new, the ask may simply be early. And partners. You may have done it alone. Nobody else was talking about it, or sharing it, or vouching for it. Trust travels faster when it's borrowed. And then timing. You launched the week before a holiday, or in a season where your people were stretched thin. Sometimes the offer is right, but the calendar was wrong.
And then there's the offer itself. Sometimes what you're selling solves a problem your audience doesn't feel yet, or they feel differently than you about that problem, or aren't even aware that the problem exists. That is fixable as well. It usually means listening more closely to the exact words they use when they describe what is hard. Every one of those is something you can add. None of them is something you are. So when something fails, ask one question. What's missing from the build? Not what's wrong with me. What was missing. That question turns a wound into a to-do list.
One more thing about the moments when fewer people showed up than you'd hoped. It's so tempting to cancel. To refund everyone, reschedule, and let it disappear. “Not enough enrollment” is a perfectly respectable sentence. But think about what happens if you run it. If three people signed up, you get three people's worth of real feedback. You hear the questions they actually ask, which are almost never the ones you guessed. You see which part lands and which part is over-explained. You find out exactly where people get stuck.
That's research you cannot buy, and it only comes from showing up fully for the people who showed up for you. So if the room is small, teach it like it's full. Those people trusted you. For that moment, they are the whole room, and they're proof that what you made is real. The program that never ran is a story with nowhere to go. The program that ran, and here's what I learned from it, has a future, and maybe something that you can tell your future customers too.
Let me tell you about a number that changed how I think about goals. I was planning a masterclass, and a colleague said to me, “You should aim for five hundred registrations.” I thought that was crazy, and I told her so. I've had classes before where I couldn't even reach a small number. She said, “Why not?” I didn't have a good answer. So I said, okay, I'm just gonna aim for five hundred.
What I did differently wasn't magic. I ran a summit right before the masterclass, so I had a warm audience who had just spent days with me. I asked colleagues to help promote it, and I made them affiliates, so if people bought my program after the class, they'd get a real share. So their yes was worth something. They weren't doing me a favor. They were partners. Over five hundred people registered. Same kind of class. Same me. Completely different result.
Look at what changed. Warmth from the summit. Partners with a real reason to help. The same missing pieces we just walked through. And once they were in place, the number I had called crazy turned out to be very reachable. And somewhere in you, there is a number, or an ask, or a project you've decided is too much. And I'm here to tell you that it's probably closer to possible than you think.
Fifty or zero. That is what I say to myself every time I'm about to do something that might not work. If you try, you have a fifty percent chance, and if you don't, you have zero. And I know that's not real math. It doesn't need to be. It's a way of seeing the choice clearly. There's always a version where you don't launch, and that version becomes a guaranteed outcome: nothing. Then there's the version where you do, and it may not work, but then again, it might.
When I reached out to authors to endorse my book, some never wrote back. Fifty or zero. When my colleague said five hundred, I fully expected to fall short. Fifty or zero. Every good thing in my business sits on the other side of something I might have failed at. I've never been handed a result I didn't first risk not getting. Getting uncomfortable is the path to my gold. I've said that for years, and I mean it. The discomfort doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong. More often, it means I'm about to do something that actually really matters.
Let's talk about the asks that go unanswered, because silence is its own kind of failure. There's no rejection to process. There's just nothing, and nothing is very easy to fill with the story. They thought I was presumptuous. They laughed. They forwarded it to someone. Most of the time, what actually happened is that a busy person got an email and didn't reply. That's the whole event. And even when it stings, silence doesn't move you backward. You're standing exactly where you were before you asked. Zero doesn't cost you anything. The only answers that change anything are yeses, and the only way to get those is to ask.
If you ask me what really keeps me going, it's pretty simple. I keep the original vision in view. The person I want to help. The way I want to help her. The reason I started in the first place. That's different from the attempts. A launch, a post, a class: those are attempts, and they're meant to be somewhat disposable. You make one, it doesn't work, you adjust, you make another. It just waits for a better attempt.
Most people, when an attempt fails, let it take the vision down with it. They stop launching because one launch flopped. They stop posting because a few posts died. They shrink the picture to match the result. Don't throw the vision out with the launch. That's easier said than lived, especially when several things fall flat in a row. When they stack up, the vision gets harder to see. Each one adds another layer of fog between you and the picture. The fog isn't the picture changing. It's only fog. And the way through isn't to stare harder at the numbers. It's to go back to the source of the vision.
For me, that's the treatment room. After a rough stretch online, I sit with a patient, and I remember in my body why I do this and who it's for. The picture comes back into focus, and I can return to the work with something to aim at. Find the source. The place where you remember why you started. Your personal why. For some of you, it's a patient. For some, it's a message from a client you saved, or the reason you left your old career, or the version of you who needed this kind of help and couldn't find it in the past. Go there when you feel the fog rolling in. Then ask the structural question. What was missing from the build? And build again. The vision is the constant. It's the one thing that you hold on to. The attempts are variables. So don't let a variable rewrite the constant.
If you're in a hard season, let this land. You're not behind. The people you're comparing yourself to have plenty behind them that you'll never see. Every practitioner you admire has a back office, and they go through their own struggles. So read it structurally. Find out what was missing. Add it, and try again. Serve the people who said yes like they're the whole room. They are where it starts. And give yourself the patience you would give your patients. You'd never write off a woman's fertility after one cycle. Please don't write off your business after just one launch.
A few practical steps before I let you go. One: take that last thing that didn't work. A launch, a post, a class, an offer. Once you're calm, write down the plain numbers. Then write down what was missing from the build. Clarity, warmth, partners, timing, or the offer. Name it.
Two: write the original vision in one or two sentences. Who do you want to help, and how? Put it somewhere you'll see it every single day. That is your constant. Read it when the next attempt doesn't go the way you had planned. Three: pick one thing you've been avoiding because it might not work out, and do it anyway. Just remember: fifty or zero.
If something you build isn't getting the response you'd hoped for, I made a free guide called You Built It. They Didn't Come. It walks through the exact moves I made to rebuild, in order, with a thirty-day checklist, so you know what to do first. And you can find it in the episode notes. And just remember that the failures aren't a detour. They're part of the path, and every practitioner you admire has walked it. Thank you for being here, and be sure to subscribe so you can be alerted to the next episode. And I will see you next time.
OUTRO
Thank you so much for spending this time with me on The Influential Practitioner. You've built something meaningful. Now it's time to let the right people find it, because when you reach more people, you get to help more people. For free resources and courses to grow your visibility, visit theinfluentialpractitioner.com. And if this episode helped you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a practitioner friend. Until next time, keep showing up and sharing your gift.
