Learning Self-Trust: My Story with High Ticket Sales

Quarter four of 2025 is going down in my business history books as one of the most expensive lessons I have learned to date. And while I have done a lot of reframing, the burns still feel a little fresh. I am sharing my high ticket sales saga because I want to pull back the curtain on the season where I almost quit my own business to work behind the scenes for others. I was convinced that the next thing I needed to improve upon was my sales, but what I actually found was a massive wake-up call that forced me to finally prioritize self-trust.

I am now at a place where I want to build my business out loud, in real time, rather than waiting until everything is pretty and figured out. This is the origin story of my newly launched podcast, Where You Water It. I realized that the grass isn’t actually greener on the other side; the grass is green where you water it.

By the way, if you are new around here, I am Ellie Brown and I help 1:1 service providers with branding identity logo design and web design. I would love to connect with you about your project, so book a Project Discussion Call if you are ready to show up more confidently.

Prefer to listen? Check out Season 1, Episode 1 of the Where You Water It podcast.

The Illusion of the Easy Button

In the summer of 2025, I was about a year postpartum, my son was going to start going to daycare around August, and I was readdyyy to dive back into a work routine that didn’t feel like I was surviving each day. I’ve always really struggled with thinking I was good enough. I have always had a bad habit of thinking I needed one more course because somebody elses processes must be better than my own, or not starting something until I had a perfect system in place. Spoiler: That just meant I was avoiding a lot of things I knew I should be doing because of perfectionism.

In June, I went to a mastermind in NYC and another brand and web designer presented to the group. I watched this woman close thousands of dollars for her services (I think she brought in like $20k for her business), and I was admittedly feeling really “bad at sales.” I was convinced sales was what I needed to learn next.

At the end of August, I saw an Instagram ad for something called remote high ticket sales. I believed joining this coaching program would teach me the skills I needed, and I won’t lie to you, I even imagined just doing sales so I could achieve the promised 15k, 20k, or 30k months. I told myself it would be easier to be an “intrapreneur”—someone who thinks like an entrepreneur but works inside someone else’s business. Oh, if I haven’t mentioned this yet, I also told myself the story that I wasn’t “meant to be the face of a business.” Joining this coaching program was my way of pushing the “easy button” as hard as I could because I felt like I hadn’t reached overnight success and consistent high-income months… I think I blacked out and totally forgot that I was only working maybe 3-4 hours a day for the past year because my son was at home with me also, ha!

I had been telling myself for a long time that I didn’t want the visibility of being a personal brand, even though I work in branding. I thought, why don’t I just cut out the fulfillment side of things and ride the coattails of someone else’s marketing? I was so caught up in the “easier” narrative that I didn’t even want to tell my friends what I was actually doing. I told people I was doing “sales consulting,” but the truth was I had pumped the brakes on my own business in the hopes that I could just exit.

When Numbers Don’t Lie

I ended up getting onto four different offers in about eight weeks. I’m not gonna lie, I was feeling really cocky that I would make back my investment quickly. However, the reality inside these businesses that hired me was far from the dream I was sold.

• One offer had hype videos from The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room inside their training modules—movies where people are literally getting arrested for doing things illegally at the end.
• The owner of that same program kept saying “men lie, women lie, numbers don’t lie,” yet there were only about 15 transactions for the entire month of October to be divided among eight people.
• On my final offer, I was super pumped to sell to a paid ad service to home service businesses, but I eventually found out I was being asked to sell lead lists that the company didn’t actually have.
• And literally so many other small things that were giving me so many red flags.

I felt yucky in the pit of my stomach because I had no trust that these companies could do the thing they said they were going to do. I couldn’t sell with conviction when I was seeing the “numbers don’t lie” mantra fall apart in real time. And to be clear, I take full accountability for not vetting these offers better. And I also think that if I were bound and determined to make sales work, I would have.

Why I Chose to Return to Ellie Brown Branding and Bet On Myself

So after four “fails,” I was starting to realize that my lack of self-trust was the real problem. I was stuck in this narrative that I wasn’t good enough, but after getting to experience the behind-the-scenes of these other businesses, it was clear that everybody is just figuring it out as they go and nobody else is perfect. And truthfully, while I needed to refine my sales calls, that wasn’t my biggest issue. What I needed to do was hyper-focus on the lead generation and marketing, not quitting.

The turning point came when a recruiter asked me what the “bare minimum” was that I needed to make each month. I realized I did not stop doing a business that I built and loved just to go earn the minimum somewhere else. I chose to stop pursuing those offers, and I have never felt more peace. I learned that the grass is green where you water it.

I’m moving forward into 2026 knowing that I’m actually pretty dang good at what I do. I know I’ll hit my goals on my own terms within my own business. It pains me a little that I had to spend a lot of money and time just to learn to trust myself, but I think I was meant to live these experiences so I could finally believe in my own process.

LINKS MENTIONED

• Follow me on Instagram @elliebrownbranding
• Work with Ellie Brown Branding